Month: November 2021

Apple is either getting more intrusive into your daily life or offering key new lifesaving features to its iPhone, depending on how you look at it.

The latest “feature” Apple wants to offer iPhone users is the ability for iPhones to detect when someone is in a car crash, so the phone can dial 911 automatically, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The feature is going to be called “crash detection” and will be available on both iPhones and Apple Watches. It’ll use data from already existing sensors in both products to detect car accidents as they occur by measuring G-forces from impact. 

Apple has already incorporated safety measures like fall-detection and walking steadiness detection to its iPhone OS. 

The crash detection software has been undergoing testing over the past year using data shared anonymously from iPhone and Apple Watch users, the report says. Apple products have “already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts”.

The company is building an algorithm for accuracy using 911 data, which helps give Apple’s software confidence that the user was involved in a crash and needs emergency attention. 

Apple wouldn’t be the first to put forth such a feature: Google added crash detection to its Pixel smartphone in 2019 and add-on apps in Apple’s App store offer similar features. 

Meanwhile, legacy auto software like GM’s OnStar has provided “automatic crash response” since 1996. 

Apple declined to comment on the potential feature, and its release is still uncertain, sources told the WSJ.

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

In sports, the term head-fake is used to describe the act of moving the head in such a way as to deceive an opponent as to one’s intended direction or move. The idea of a billionaire tax to tax the super-rich with the idea they will pay for all the gifts the government wants to shower on the people is such a distraction. The idea we can level a playing field that is totally tilted to favor the rich by taxing them after billions of dollars are transferred into their coffers through questionable policies is bullshit.

Small Businesses Provide Choice

Politicians are about to embark on a bit of expensive theater to give the impression they can address inequality through increasing taxes on the ultra-rich, this will fail. What we need are policies that promote small businesses. Small businesses provide choice, and choice is freedom. Freedom to live as you wish and options on how you shape your future. Freedom stands in total opposition to the World Economic Forum idea that by 2030 you will own nothing and be happy. 

Let us assume that what ProPublica found is true; While the median American household earning roughly $70,000 per year paid 14% in federal taxes each year, the 25 richest Americans (by Forbes’ tally) paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% on wealth growth of $401 billion between 2014 and 2018. If so, you can understand why those households with a $70,000 per year income are steamed. ProPublica also claims that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires have seen a 70% increase in their wealth, from nearly $3 trillion to almost $5 trillion.

So, what exactly is in this “billionaires tax bill” and how would it work? Nobody really knows because the devil is in the details and those remain few and far apart. Supposedly, the proposal would only impact taxpayers with more than $1 billion in assets, or those with incomes of more than $100 million for three consecutive years. This means the tax would apply to only about 700 of the wealthiest people in America. 

The billionaire tax is an attempt to convince the American people the government can bring in more revenue to help offset the massive spending proposed by progressive democrats and the Biden administration. Such a ploy massively distracts from addressing the unfolding economic nightmare unleashed upon the American people.

It also does little to alter the reality of growing inequality, a weakening economy, and the growing political divide that rips at our nation. The hole being created by the loss of choice and options can never be corrected by merely transferring wealth to the least wealthy. Once spent, this money quickly returns to those at the top.

Growing Inequality Was a Problem long Before Covid-19

I contend that today many of the super-rich are capitalist crones and shills of the government. They have been anointed to carry out the mission placed upon them by the super-powerful that pull the strings of society. Make no mistake, this bullshit is a pile of crap dished out to us by progressives so they can unleash their massive spending plan and transfer wealth to those supporting them.

When you label something as free you tend to get a lot of takers and this time they are promising a gift to almost everyone.

The answer is to create a system where certain individuals have not been given favored status in the first place.

Governments are often behind where many of these billionaires have gotten their profits in the first place.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon had the aid of a tax system (no sales tax on online sales) and the United States Postal Service (below-cost deliveries) to propel it forward. Also, politicians rushed to give the company special deals for locating distribution systems in their area, local longtime businesses be damned. 

Tesla and Apple follow the same storyline. Elon Musk has sucked on the government teat to where everything he does is subsidized. While it is still debated whether electric vehicles are better for the environment the masses told by the mass media and a government that has never demonstrated much insight to creating a compelling sustainable future have declared them our savior. Before that it was Steve Jobs, people tend to forget how much of Apple’s success flowed from the government buying and filling schools with Apple computers that were produced overseas. 

Two big issues:

• First, these taxes will not stay on the super-rich, they will morph into a system that works its way downward to the upper-middle-class.

• Second, the super-rich will avoid such a tax like the plague and shape any legislation to avoid affecting them. The super-rich employs an army of pencil pushers and experts with only one intention and that is to exploit loopholes in the tax code.

It is difficult to ignore how our government has battered small businesses since Covid-19 entered the picture. The one thing you can count on is that it is more about giving the impression we are now asking, no, requiring the wealthy elite to give back some of the wealth showered upon them. If that were ever to happen, which I doubt, we can expect to be told to stop criticizing them for taking so much. All in all, I call this noise about a billionaire tax bullshit. 

Pigs will likely sprout wings and fly before anything gets done to address the true causes behind inequality, tomorrow politicians will be off on another tangent. 

During her tenure in the Wrigley Mansion, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has given her deeply unpopular predecessor Rahm Emmanuel a run for his money.

After royally pissing off police by accusing the state’s largest local police union of trying to induce an insurrection over the vaccine mandate, the Chicago Fraternal order of Police asked Cook County judge to grant a restraining order that blocks the City of Chicago’s vaccine mandate – and won a temporary reprieve, of sorts.

On Monday, Cook County Judge Raymond Mitchell ruled that Chicago police can skip the Covid-19 vaccination, for now, but that officers do have to report their vaccination status per the city’s current requirement. The order, which appears to only apply to CFO Union members, also prevents the city from disciplining police who are not fully vaccinated or exempt by the year’s end.

That said, Mitchell’s order still allows Chicago to place noncompliant officers who refuse to report their vaccination status on no-pay status. What’s more, the Dec. 31 vaccination deadline remains in place for all other city employees, according to Courthouse News.

In his written ruling, Mitchell wrote that he partially granted the FOP’s request for a temporary restraining order to protect the polices unions’ collective bargaining power and what he deemed the “arbitrarily” of their grievances with the vaccine mandate. Both the city and the FOP agreed in court last week that the ongoing fight over the vaccine mandate would be best solved via arbitration.

“I don’t commentate on wins and losses regarding a judge’s ruling,” said Chicago Police Supt. David Brown. “But I will say we are proceeding with our protocol to get officers in the portal.”

City attorneys will face off against the Fraternal Order of Police again next week as city hall continues to maintain that the Police Department’s decision to get around the mask mandate puts others at risk (even though recent research shows that there’s little risk).

Stay tuned for more…

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Are we about to witness one of the greatest self-inflicted economic wounds in history? 

Vaccine mandate deadlines are starting to arrive, and large numbers of very qualified people are losing their jobs as a result.  Of course this comes at a very bad time, because we are already in the midst of the most epic worker shortage in U.S. history.  Despite the biggest hiring push that I have ever seen in my entire lifetime, businesses all over America are still desperate for workers.  The funny thing is that lots of available workers should theoretically be out there somewhere.  The number of Americans that are currently working is still about five million less than the peak that was hit just before the pandemic arrived.  So where did all of those missing workers go?  That is a question that we desperately need an answer for, because millions of workers seem to have evaporated from the system. 

Now the vaccine mandates are going to make things far worse, because millions of Americans that are actually good at their jobs are going to be ruthlessly terminated, and finding replacements for them is going to be exceedingly difficult.

For instance, you can’t just pull guys off the street and have them fly planes.  Very soon, large numbers of pilots will be sent packing on a permanent basis, and pilots for American Airlines gave us a taste of what is coming by engaging in a “sick out” over the weekend…

American Airlines canceled another 634 flights on Sunday, more than 12% of its total operations for the day, the company said Sunday.

The airline has now canceled more than 1,500 flights since Friday, as it deals with weather issues and staffing shortages that started last week.

Of course American Airlines is trying to blame “the weather” for these canceled flights, but everyone knows what is really going on.

And I greatly applaud the pilots for taking a stand.

If these airlines don’t reverse their mandates, pretty soon we will have widespread air travel headaches on a permanent basis in this nation.

In New York City, Friday was the deadline for municipal workers to get vaccinated, and more than 26,000 of them have refused to comply…

Twenty-six percent of municipal employees in New York City were still unvaccinated following a Friday deadline that mandated workers get the COVID-19 vaccine.

A significant jump in vaccinations occurred among city employees due to the deadline, the city said, according to The Associated Press, but more than 26,000 workers have not uploaded proof of their vaccination status and face unpaid leave as a result.

Moving forward, all of the work that those 26,000 workers used to do simply will not get done.

Already, a total of 26 fire companies have had to be completely shut down…

The FDNY shuttered 26 fire companies citywide on Saturday due to staff shortages caused by the COVID-19 vaccination mandate, according to furious elected officials, who ripped the move as “unconscionable” — and warned it could have catastrophic consequences.

So will this cost lives?

Of course it will.

In fact, a seven-year-old boy just died in an apartment fire…

A seven-year-old boy died and his grandmother was seriously injured in an apartment fire in New York City as the FDNY deals with staff shortages in response to a vaccine mandate.

Firefighters responded to a 1:30 a.m. call Saturday at a building in Washington Heights, where fire broke out in the building superintendent’s basement apartment. First responders quickly contained and extinguished the fire.

Meanwhile, trash is starting to pile up around the city at a very alarming rate…

Trash bags can be spotted all over the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, where some residents said that it has been days since their trash was last picked up. A few said they realized something was off earlier in the week, as one missed pickup happens, but they started to think there was a problem after the second missed time.

On both residential streets and commercial areas, the trash bags on the sidewalk are piled several feet high in some instances. One resident who has lived in the area for about 40 years said she has never seen the area as dirty as has been the past few days.

So what is the city going to look and smell like in a few months once we get into the early portion of 2022?

The sad thing is that none of this had to happen.

The vaccine mandates are absurd, and they are going to cause enormous problems all over the country.

Countless supply chain workers are going to be pulled out of our supply chains in the coming months, and we are already facing painful shortages from coast to coast…

Supermarket chains are revamping their operations to navigate persistent product shortages, expanding storage space and curbing discounts to make sure they don’t run out.

Companies are planning for shortages of popular brands of food and staples to continue for months and managers are trying to keep up as different products run short from week to week, industry executives said.

A lot of Americans are still expecting these shortages to go away eventually, but Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is now admitting that there will be supply chain problems “as long as the pandemic continues”…

Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg says the supply chain crisis will continue at least until the COVID-19 pandemic ends amid fears of shortages ahead of the winter holidays.

‘There are definitely going to continue to be issues, especially as long as the pandemic continues,’ Buttigieg told Fox News Sunday. ‘If you have, for example, the third-largest container port in the world in China shutting down because of a COVID outbreak in late summer you’ll feel that in the fall here on the West coast.’

Of course there is no end in sight for the pandemic.  The virus is constantly mutating, and any immunity to it is very temporary.

So just like the common cold and the flu, COVID will be with us indefinitely.

If Biden administration officials want to reverse recent polling trends, they better find a way to address our supply chain issues, because right now their numbers are really dismal.  Here is just one example…

“Americans have lost their confidence in President Joe Biden and their optimism for the country.”

That, according to Chuck Todd, is the top takeaway from a just-released NBC News poll out Sunday. Breaking down the numbers on Meet the Press, Todd pointed to data from the survey that he deemed “shocking.”

“Just 22 percent of adults say [the U.S. is] headed in the right direction,” Todd reported. “A shocking 71 percent say we’re on the wrong track.”

The only surprise from that survey is that there are 22 percent of Americans that are still gullible enough to have a positive outlook.

The Democrats have cooked up a recipe for national suicide, and they are setting the stage for so many of the things that I warned about in my latest book.

If Joe Biden had any sense, he would rescind all nationwide vaccine mandates immediately.

But he isn’t going to do that.

And major cities like New York and Los Angeles are not going to rescind their mandates either.

So “things are not gonna get done” on an absolutely massive scale in 2022, and we will all suffer deeply as a result.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

In an amusing twist, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid began his latest Daily Reid note by offering “all due respect to his readers in Australia”, because “I’m going to open the market section this morning with a line I don’t think I’ve written in 27 years of market commentary and probably won’t again. And it’s not about England thrashing Australia at cricket on Saturday. Yes the most important event of the week could be the RBA meeting tomorrow.”

Even ahead of the meeting, there has been some unprecedented fireworks (which we discussed previously), as 2 year yields last week rose from 0.15% on Wednesday morning to 0.775% at the close on Friday as the RBA were conspicuous by their absence in defending the 0.1% target on the April 24 bond.

That said, Reid has “absolutely zero idea what they are going to do tomorrow which should help you all tremendously but their absence again this morning gives a decent indication. I was taught economics in an era where central banks liked to keep an element of mystery and surprise. As such I’ve always disliked the forward guidance era as it encourages markets to pile on to much riskier, one way positions that a normally functioning market should naturally allow. But to go from forward guidance to silence (that rhymes) is a recipe for huge market turmoil if the facts change.”

That said, Reid echoes what we wrote over the weekend in ““10 To 20 Asset Managers Are Being Liquidated” – Rate Vol Exploding Just As Funds Pile Into Repo Trade That Blew Up Market” and admits that “It’s unclear if the full implications of last week’s carnage at the global front end has yet been cleared out. There is lots of speculation about large unwinds, big stop losses etc. Liquidity was also awful last week. Much might depend on central banks this week. Make no mistake though there is considerable pain out there.“

The latest this morning in Aussie rates is that the 2y yield is down around -7bps while the 10y yield is down -19.0bps.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

About 9,000 New York City workers, including firefighters and police officers, were placed on unpaid leave Monday for not complying with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

“Nine thousand people [were] placed on leave without pay today,” Mitch Schwartz, a spokesperson for de Blasio’s office, told media outlets on Monday.

“The rest are in various stages of having their accommodation requests reviewed. They can be at work.”

Data released by the mayor’s office on Sunday night said that about 22,800 municipal workers are not vaccinated. Around the same time, de Blasio wrote on Twitter that “more than half of the workers who haven’t been vaccinated yet have submitted exemption requests and those requests are being processed.”

A day earlier, the Democrat mayor confirmed that 91 percent of city workers got the vaccine as of Saturday night, a jump of about 8 percent from the previous day.

Starting today, city workers who have not got at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine would be placed on leave, triggering concerns about shortages of firefighters, EMS workers, and police officers.

De Blasio, however, said during a news conference on Monday the vaccine requirement has not led to service interruptions at police, fire, or sanitation offices around the city. A high number of employees called in sick, he said.

“We have every reason to believe there’s a lot of people out there claiming to be sick who are not and it’s not acceptable. So the thing to do is to do the right thing. Come to work, protect people as you took an oath to do,” de Blasio said Monday.

New York City’s fire chief, Daniel Nigro, said that the increase in sick calls are “related to protests against the mandate, it’s obvious.”

He added: 

“Generally 200 people come into our medical office every day, in this past week, it’s been 700 a day. Most, the majority of them, are unvaccinated. This is completely unacceptable.”

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in the news conference that his agency has an 85 percent vaccination rate as of Monday.

“Members of the police department responded to this [vaccine mandate], they came to work as they always do and there is literally no effect on service at this point,” Shea said.

In contrast to de Blasio’s remarks, the heads of various unions said that they expect departments to be closed down over the mandate and staffing shortages.

It is “not entirely clear how many fire companies will be closed” on Monday as a result of the mandate, Andy Ansbro, the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association union, said in publicly available remarks.

“We’re here today because of a mandate that was put on the, you know, our members, but also on all New York City employees given nine days to make a life-changing decision on their career or whether or not they can take a vaccine,” he added. “And we’re going to live with the aftermath of this right now.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who represents areas in New York City, warned that 26 firehouses stopped operations on Saturday due to the mandate.

“As of 7:30 this morning, 26 FDNY stations, including five in my district, have closed due to Mayor de Blasio’s decision to lock unvaccinated firefighters out of work,” Malliotakis said in an Oct. 30 statement.

The Fire Department of New York City and de Blasio’s office have not immediately responded to a request for comment.