The Wall Street Journal article called The Loneliest Generation: Americans, More Than Ever, Are Aging Alone, published in late 2018, provides excellent insight into a serious mental and physical health crisis developing for baby boomers: loneliness and isolation.
The solution to solving the loneliness crisis among older Americans could be a robot animal, according to the New York Post.
Carrolyn Minggia, 64, felt isolated after her aunt passed away last November. The Brooklyn Heights resident never married and has no children quickly found herself alone.
In April, Minggia received a robot dog that looks exactly like a golden retriever puppy. The cuddly robot requires four C batteries and doesn’t make a mess.
“I know it’s mechanical, but when you walk past it, it says something to you, and when you live alone, it matters,” says Minggia, a retired development coordinator.
Minggia’s new robo-pup is part of a unique statewide pilot program by the New York Department for the Aging (DFTA) that delivered 60 of these robots to baby boomers suffering from loneliness.
Named Golden Pup, the robot retails on Amazon for $119, provides realistic features of a puppy without the mess. It has built-in sensors that respond to touch and motion. The dogs respond to sounds and even have a pulse.
“They bark, they nuzzle,” says Cortés-Vázquez. They’re “a wonderful way to replace that same gratification and tenderness and joy that you once had with your pets.”
Minggia wants to get a real dog soon, but, given that she is seriously ill, her robo-pup is a great substitute.
“You know there’s mechanics in the center of him, so he’s not squishy,” she says. But “I don’t have to clean up after him, I don’t have to walk him. He brings me joy.”
Baby boomers have three choices of robot companion animals: Golden Pup Companion, Cat Companion, and Kitten Companion.
As the population ages, technology firms have recognized the US has a demographic problem. Millennials have no money, so what’s the point in making products for them. It’s the baby boomers who have the wealth, and that is why companies have started releasing products tailored with them in mind.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2X4Iaxm Tyler Durden
Saudi Arabia’s CEO Amin Nasr’s message to the press that oil flows to the market are guaranteed, should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Looking at the current volatility in the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the possibility of a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Aramco CEO’s message might be a bit overoptimistic. In reality, Aramco will not be able to keep the necessary crude oil and products volumes flowing to Asian and European markets in the case of a full Strait of Hormuz blockade. Even that Aramco owns and operates a crude oil pipeline with a capacity of 5 million bpd, carrying crude 1,200 kilometers between the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea, much more is needed to keep the oil market stable.
Nasr’s move to stabilize the market is praiseworthy but should be seen as an attempt to quell fears of traders and financial analysts, especially just before the OPEC+ meeting in Viennanext week. Nasr reiterated that Aramco (aka the Kingdom) is able to supply sufficient crude through the Red Sea, reiterating that the necessary pipeline and terminal infrastructure is there. However, what analysts tend to forget, Nasr’s statement is only linked to Saudi’s oil export volumes, which will likely be not higher this summer than around the level this pipeline can support. The real issue, if it comes to a full-blown conflict, is that not only Saudi oil is being threatened.
At present, between 20-21 million bpd of crude and petroleum products are transported via the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi exports are a vast part of it, but also the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Iran, will have to look at additional routes. A closure or military action in the region will cause a temporary disruption for all maritime traffic. Besides the options that are the already on the table, such as the Saudi onshore pipeline and the UAE’s Fujairah pipeline, no other real alternatives are available, as overland trucking or rail transport is minimal. Transferring volumes via the Saudi and UAE’s pipelines is not an option at all, as the total capacity of the two is less than 10 million bpd, representing not even 50% of the current maritime flows through Hormuz. Another thing that should be noted is that pipelines can’t ship crude and crude products at the same time.
(Click to enlarge)
Another consequence of a blockade would be that most available VLCCs and other tankers will either be in the Persian Gulf (and blocked) or will not be able to be rerouted. Before the market will have found a solution for this, days and probably weeks will have gone by, and a price spike for all products is to be expected. This will likely also be the case for LNG and other commodity flows.
Few analysts are talking about oilfield security and pipeline availability. Any military advisor will put these options as part of his or her 1st phase military action plan. If Iran were to be attacked, or faces a surgical strike by an opponent, all Arab oil and gas infrastructure will become a legitimate offensive target (at least in the eyes of Tehran and its proxies). Geographically seen, Tehran has been dealt the best cards. Looking at the majority of oil and gas production assets and infrastructure in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia, UAE or even Iraq, everything is in reach of short-distance missiles, fighter jets and even drones. Any move against Iran will result in a full-scale attack on Saudi’s Eastern Province (which produces 80% of all its oil and gas), Abu Dhabi’s offshore oil infrastructure and the regional pipelines. Looking at history, denying energy access and diminishing the opponents stability is a no-brainer in military strategy.
It can be taken for granted that Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah and others, already have prepared their oil and gas infrastructure strategy. Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and even Manama, will be frantically looking for answers, but the geographical situation is disastrous.
Quelling fears in the market is the right thing to do, but reality also needs to be addressed. Nasr’s message is that of an oil company CEO, taking all precautions to deal with a calamity. ADNOC’s Sultan will be doing the same. Still, the oil market is at present a victim of geopolitical power projections of emotional leaders superseding rationality. This confrontation is one of a possibly unprecedented order, not for oil (as sceptics again will state) but with oil as a weapon for defeat or survival. The continuing reference to the Iran-Iraq tanker war during 1980-1988 is out of touch with reality. At this time, it is not going to be Iran denying support or trade with Iraq, but a possible Arab-Iranian confrontation, led by the USA if no countermeasures are being implemented.
Asian consumers will need to prepare for severe price hikes in the most optimistic scenario, but also for a shutdown of vast parts of their economy. Hormuz will not be standing on its own, more is to be taken into account, especially proxy reactions in Yemen (Gulf of Aden) or East Med (Hezbollah). Negative repercussions for Europeans are also in the picture. Saudi Arabia can do a lot, but saving the global economy if the Gulf explodes is not one of their capabilities.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KKYNwa Tyler Durden
Following a less than positive week for Boeing shareholders, we suspect things are about to get worse as The Seattle Times reports that, according to two sources familiar with the matter, federal prosecutors have expanded their probe beyond just 737 Max planes.
Federal prosecutors have reportedly subpoenaed records from Boeing relating to the production of the 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, where there have been allegations of shoddy work.
The Seattle Times notes that the 787 subpoena significantly widens the scope of the DOJ’s scrutiny of safety issues at Boeing.
The new probe follows reports that pilots warned regulators about a problem on Boeings Dreamliners.
A critical fire-fighting system on Boeing’s £160million Dreamliner fleet was found to have the possibility of malfunctioning.
Boeing issued an alert, warning that the switch used to extinguish an engine fire and sever fuel supply and hydraulic fluid to stop flames from spreading on its B787 aircraft failed in a ‘small number’ of cases.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that the problem was ‘likely to exist or develop in other products of the same design’, warning that ‘the potential exists for an airline fire to be uncontrollable’.
FAA, however, decided not to ground the Dreamliner but ordered airlines like British Airways or TUI to check the switch every 30 days.
Additionally, a handful of subpoenas were issued in early June to individual employees at Boeing’s 737 Dreamliner production plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, the newspaper reports, citing a third source.
A Boeing spokesman said, “We don’t comment on legal matters.”
Boeing, Boeing, Gone?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NkWX7G Tyler Durden
The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans…
The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.
But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.
Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.
Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formalsegregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.
Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction difficult. Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.
But, of course, Boomers didn’t only make rules that nudge young people out of homeownership. They also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.
Just as tight land-use rules make existing homeowners richer by reducing how many new houses are listed on the market, strict licensing rules make existing workers richer by reducing competition in their fields. And while some industries clearly need licensing rules for health and safety reasons, most of the growth in licensure has been in fields where health and safety justifications are less salient: Do you really need hours of course work and special exams to be a florist, an interior designer, or an auctioneer?
By privileging existing workers, licensure rules increase income inequality, and they do so specifically by shifting income toward older workers. When licensure standards exclude felons, they also disproportionately affect minorities. Young people, and especially minorities, are increasingly being legally prohibited from work.
Again, scholars differ on explanations for why licensure has proliferated. It could be that work has simply gotten more complex. Or it could be that the decline of unions led to a search for new ways to maintain occupational closure. Increased gender and racial integration in workplaces may also have led to a search for new forms of hierarchy.
But even for workers who don’t need a formal license, barriers to work have grown over time. Jobs that once required a high-school degree now require a college degree. This escalation of credential requirements has created a kind of educational arms race. The rise in collegiate attainment, again, did not beginwith Boomers. Rather, the GI Bill, and the explosion in new university chartering that it underwrote, created a new norm of college education for many jobs. With the rising availability of higher education, employers, who tend to be older than their employees, often demand degrees as licenses.
Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.
As with formal licensing and land-use rules, there are explanations for the rise of degree requirements: greater public support for education, a complex economy, growing demand for knowledge-workers. All probably have some validity. But the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.
And whatever specific factors contributed to the rise of licensure, land-use rules, and demands for more degrees, these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of life. Regardless of changes in formal segregation, unionization, demand for knowledge workers, returns to various asset classes, or other explanations for the rise of work and housing regulation, what is striking is that these trends occurred simultaneously. A graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend. Sector-specific explanations seem a bit suspect when the trend itself is so general.
The most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates. Even though murder rates are today at the same levels they were in the 1950s, the imprisoned share of the population is higher in America than in any country other than North Korea. We imprison a larger share of the population than authoritarian countries such as Turkmenistan and China.
That huge spike has a very clear origin in the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Academic research has shown that incarcerating more criminals does reduce crime somewhat, so, as with all the other examples I’ve given, this response was understandable.
But many countries experienced a similar crime wave. Most of them experienced similar crime declines in the 1990s, even without so much imprisonment. Furthermore, research has also shown that imprisonment patterns in America were heavily biased by race, with incarceration rates not always reflecting actual rates of criminality.
Today, while incarceration rates are edging lower, they remain astonishingly high. Even as younger Americans are locked out of jobs and housing by strict rules set by previous generations, a startlingly large share of them, especially in minority communities, are literally behind bars. Those who remain free are nonetheless bereft of family, friends, and potential co-workers—and whole communities are, as a matter of law, stripped of potential workers.
It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s. And whatever specific arguments may have justified a command-and-control response to crime, this kind of response reared its head for everymajor political problem encountered by Baby Boomers: housing, jobs, education, crime, and, of course, debt.
Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time. Already, in places such as Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico, where political rules make flexible solutions hard and the population is aging very quickly, massive debt restructurings loom large. But around the country, the pressures of long-term obligations will grow.
Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilities. It’s based on consensus forecasts from groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget for economic growth and for programs such as Social Security and Medicare where such forecasts are available—but in some cases, such as state debts and pensions, no such forecast was available, and so I developed a simple one.
Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.
Furthermore, the basic demographic balance sheet is getting worse all the time, increasing the relative burden on young people. Working-age Americans are dying off in alarming numbers.
The odds of a 32-year-old dying have risen by 24 percent in the past five years, even as death rates among older Americans are about stable. Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence. But, of course, while this sudden increase in working-age death rates is a new concern, the long-run fiscal crunch has been obvious for decades. For virtually the entire period of Boomer political dominance, it has been obvious that long-term obligations needed to be fixed. And yet, the problem has not been fixed. Younger Americans will suffer the consequences.
As dire as this all sounds, there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically unpalatable.
Not all of these problems were first caused by the Boomers, but they each worsened on their watch. If leaders in business, education, and politics want to solve these problems, they can. Whether the gerontocracy in charge today wants solutions may be another question altogether.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/320DWug Tyler Durden
If his bizarre performance during the first Democratic debate wasn’t enough to solidify Bill De Blasio’s likely destiny as one of the first to drop out of the Presidential race, his comments on Thursday should seal the deal. The often ridiculed NYC Mayor was forced on Thursday to apologize after quoting Communist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara during a rally with striking Miami airport workers, according to the Daily Mail.
De Blasio said at the rally: “We’re going to stand up and fight for every one of you, because in Miami-Dade we need to do something that we have to do all over this country: We have to put working people first.”
And then, quoting Guevara, he shouted: “Hasta la victoria siempre!” The line translates to “Until victory, always!” and was a favorite of Guevara, an ally and adviser to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
The article notes that while many on the left view Guevara as an “icon of liberal chic”, history tells another tale: he was “a ruthless figure who ordered Cuban prisoners at the La Cabaña Fortress executed without trial.”
De Blasio Tweeted an apology on Thursday: “I did not know the phrase I used in Miami today was associated with Che Guevara & I did not mean to offend anyone who heard it that way,’ he wrote. ‘I certainly apologize for not understanding that history. I only meant it as a literal message to the striking airport workers that I believed they would be victorious in their strike.”
I only meant it as a literal message to the striking airport workers that I believed they would be victorious in their strike- BdB. (2/2)
Naturally, Republicans had a field day with his comments:
Meanwhile, De Blasio’s debate performance was so underwhelming that he is now listed below Mark Zuckerberg, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Oprah Winfrey as the potential Democratic nominee, according to PredictIt.org.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2xhw9tY Tyler Durden
Just in time for the 2020 election, Twitter has come up with a new “policy” that is obviously intended to neuter the effectiveness of President Trump’s Twitter account.
Right now, Trump has 61.4 million followers on Twitter, and his tweets regularly make headlines all over the world. Trump has been devastatingly effective on Twitter for years, and his social media strategy was one of the keys to his victory in 2016. Needless to say, the radical leftists that run Twitter were absolutely horrified by Trump’s upset victory, and they want to do whatever they can to make sure that such a thing never happens again.
They started by deleting, shadowbanning and greatly suppressing the accounts of prominent conservatives. Personally, my own account has been shadowbanned for a very long time. I have over 16,000 followers, but if you check out my account you will notice that I barely get any retweets at all these days. However, a few years ago there was a ton of interaction with my tweets. An expert looked into it and found that just like so many other prominent conservatives, I had been shadowbanned.
But all of the censorship that we have seen so far is apparently not enough for the control freaks at Twitter, and so now they are going after President Trump himself.
On Thursday, Twitter announced a brand new policy which is obviously aimed at the White House. The following comes from Twitter’s official blog post about this new policy…
With this in mind, there are certain cases where it may be in the public’s interest to have access to certain Tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules. On the rare occasions when this happens, we’ll place a notice – a screen you have to click or tap through before you see the Tweet – to provide additional context and clarity. We’ll also take steps to make sure the Tweet is not algorithmically elevated on our service, to strike the right balance between enabling free expression, fostering accountability, and reducing the potential harm caused by these Tweets.
Who does this apply to?
We will only consider applying this notice on Tweets from accounts that meet the following criteria. The account must:
Be or represent a government official, be running for public office, or be considered for a government position (i.e., next in line, awaiting confirmation, named successor to an appointed position);
Have more than 100,000 followers; and
Be verified.
That said, there are cases, such as direct threats of violence or calls to commit violence against an individual, that are unlikely to be considered in the public interest.
They are trying to make this sound like a “neutral” policy that will apply evenly to all government officials, but if you believe that then there is a bridge not too far from Twitter headquarters that I would like to sell you.
In essence, Twitter is telling us that they are going to start suppressing President Trump’s tweets. And if other conservative government officials get out of line, they will be censored too.
This is happening right out in the open, and Twitter is brazenly admitting that any tweets that they slap with this “notice” will “feature less prominently on Twitter”…
When a Tweet has this notice placed on it, it will feature less prominently on Twitter, and not appear in:
Safe search
Timeline when switched to Top Tweets
Live events pages
Recommended Tweet push notifications
Notifications tab
Explore
This notice won’t be applied to any Tweets sent before today and, given the conditions outlined above, it’s unlikely you’ll encounter it often. We cannot predict the first time it will be used, but we wanted to give you more information about this new notice before you come across it on Twitter.
And when Twitter decides that something will “feature less prominently”, it might as well not even be there at all. I know that very well, because this is what has been happening to my tweets for years.
The move, announced Thursday, came barely 24 hours after President Donald Trump accused the social media platform’s leaders of censoring him in a bid to limit the circulation of his ideas.
Of course Twitter is far from alone.
All over the Internet, social media companies are making an all-out effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
For example, the day before Twitter announced their new policy, Reddit “quarantined” one of the most popular pro-Trump subreddits…
On Wednesday, Reddit “quarantined” a popular pro-Donald Trump forum on its site. Although the move was prompted because the “r/The_Donald” subreddit was hosting violent threats and violating other site policies, it’s likely to add to Republicans’ complaints that social media companies are biased against conservatives.
Reddit put the message board, which is a popular place for Trump fans to gather and stir up support, in a sort of virtual detention due to what the company called “significant issues with reporting and addressing violations” of its content policy.
Could you imagine what would have happened if the big social media companies had blatantly tried to rig elections against Barack Obama?
There would have been rioting in the streets and Democrats would have been steaming mad.
So why are conservatives taking this censorship with so much apathy?
As a result, right now there are only a few members of Congress that are actively trying to do something about this.
We are literally losing our country, and only a very small minority of the people care enough to get involved.
At this point the major social media companies are not even attempting to hide their blatant election-rigging anymore, and it looks like they may totally get away with it.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FEI4qy Tyler Durden
A 29-year-old man from south Wales was shocked when his Amazon echo dot device began calling him a shithead whenever he asked the personal assistant to play music.
Michael Slade says the device began swearing at him the day after he tried to cancel his Amazon Prime subscription, according to the Daily Mail.
“I tried to cancel my subscription and had a short conversation with someone in customer services and the next day my Alexa is calling me names,” said Slade, adding “I’ve spoken to technical support and they’ve never heard of this happening before.“
According to the Mail, Amazon offered Slade gift cards and a year of free Prime membership to make up for it.
“I normally asked it to play me music. I’ve never made a playlist. When I ask it to play music, it would say ‘here’s something you might like’ and it’s normally some pop or student favourites,” he added. “I was a bit annoyed at the gift card they send me – five pounds is hardly enough for being called a s*** head.”
“All I wanted to do was cancel my Prime subscription because I wasn’t using it. I’ve wondered if someone has changed something on my account.”
That said, “Software is available for the Echo Dot speaker that can make Alexa curse — but it is unclear whether someone might have deliberately uploaded this to the device.”
Michael says that’s not the case, however.
“I swear I haven’t done anything to it. Hand on heart I haven’t made it say it, or know why. Nor do any of my housemates.”
Amazon disagrees, as a spokesperson told The Sun: “Customers are able to personalise their Alexa experience, including playlist names. Alexa would not respond in this way without some customisation from the user.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Jh0Nt9 Tyler Durden
One of my favourite cartoons as a kid was ‘Battle of the Planets’, where the super-teenagers from G-Force would ‘transmute’ into heroes to save Earth from the spectacular evil techno-animal forces of Spectra. I didn’t know it back then, but while it sounded very American it was actually a very Japanese production. Forty years later, today and tomorrow the whole world will be watching the G-Force at work in Japan and wondering if it will “Five acting as one”…or instead a ‘Battle of the Planet’.
Indeed, there isn’t much more to say than that. Markets are all going to be held hostage to a series of crucial meetings between world leaders to deal with the global economy, Iran, and US-China trade tensions (if that is what we are still referring to them as). As a sub-set we have tensions between the US and Japan; and the US and India; and the US and the EU; and basically the US and everyone. If only we had Spectra to unite us as a common foe! Or perhaps we do in the form of climate change and plastic pollution: isn’t that the real ‘Battle of the Planet’?
In terms of the US and China, the market is still hoping for the best, yet our base-case scenario is for a can-kicking exercise at best. Beijing is apparently still insisting that Huawei is part of any trade agreement, which looks highly unlikely given the mood of Congress in the US, and that US tariffs are removed, and that Chinese purchases of US goods are “realistic” – which given the economy is underperforming does not suggest means a large increase. Worse, even Larry Kudlow came out to say that the US might instead raise tariffs further. When you’ve lost Kudlow…
As such, probably the most optimistic outcome this weekend is a renewal of trade talks based on those starting positions – which at least delays the hike in tariffs, even if it solves nothing longer term. Indeed, consider that the New York Times today has an article titled “US vs. China: A New Era of Great Power Competition, but Without Boundaries.” Indeed. We have been talking about Great Power struggles for over a year and trying to draw the conclusions from past episodes – and all of them point to trading and investing in your opponent as a fast-forward route to defeat. Not that autarchy or mercantilism automatically mean victory, but running large trade deficits with ‘the other side’ is very poor long-term strategy, or so both logic and the actual heuristic run.
Meanwhile, with so many pieces all in play in the UK we have the “Tory-graph” arguing that a PM Boris would be able to persuade Germany he is serious about severing ties with the EU if they won’t budge, de facto making the UK the 51st US state, and leaving Europe with less scale and adrift geopolitically, vulnerable to the predations of China and the US. That, they argue, might be the existential angst required for a Brexit deal to be done on the UK’s terms rather than Hard alternative. Of course, if that view is wrong then it’s the UK (and the EU?) who are going to be on the wrong end of geopolitics and geo-economics. Certainly, many reading the opinion piece will see their hair stand up like Boris (or 7-Zark-7’s antennae, for those who recall).
Within the US itself the second Democratic party presidential nominee debate is getting underway. There was no clear winner from the first round of 10, according to pundits, though Tulsi Gabbard saw searches for her name soar country-wide, and several–though by no means all–of the candidates named “China” as the largest geopolitical threat the US faces.
Within the US itself the second Democratic party presidential nominee debate is getting underway. There was no clear winner from the first round of 10, according to pundits, though Tulsi Gabbard saw searches for her name soar country-wide, and several–though by no means all–of the candidates named “China” as the largest geopolitical threat the US faces.
So what of the next set of 10 candidates so far? One sci-fi fan on Twitter noted he’d vote for the first candidate who answers a question in Klingon: well, we already got a USD27 trillion spending plan from Bernie Saunders, which to some voters will sound like just what the US needs, and to others like pure science-fiction. Andrew Yang, has repeated a line I have heard so very often: that US blue-collar job losses are all to do with automation, not China. In which case, as someone has just asked him on Twitter, why are all the robots choosing to live in China and not the US?
Another candidate, Andrew Yang, has repeated a line I have heard so very often: that US blue-collar job losses are all to do with automation, not China. In which case, as someone has just asked him on Twitter, why are all the robots choosing to live in China and not the US?
At this point publication deadlines mean we have to leave our live coverage, but the trend is clear – Trumpian consensus-busting populism is alive and kicking at both ends of the political spectrum.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IX6mOv Tyler Durden
Up to a dozen US F-22A Raptor Stealth Jets have touched down at the US Air Base Al-Udeid in Qatar amid soaring tensions with Iran, and as the Pentagon continues to bolster its forces in the gulf after the recent prepared military attack called off by President Trump at the last minute.
The aerial defense analysis site, The Aviationist, confirmed the new US stealth jet deployment and noted, “While it’s still not confirmed that the deployment of the Raptor was just a pre-planned rotation to the region (rather than part of a build up of forces around Iran), according to rumors, more tactical assets are being moved to the Gulf area in the following days.”
#BREAKING: Twelve F-22A 5th Gen. fighter jets of 94th Fighter Squadron, 1st Fighter Wing arrived Al-Udeid AB, #Qatar in-order to reinforce #USAF‘s combat capability in #MiddleEast for confronting hostile activities of #Iran‘s Islamic Regime in the region when it is necessary. pic.twitter.com/1MAfD8dft5
On Thursday at least nine of the reported dozen F-22 Raptors belonging to the 192nd Fighter Wing of the Virginia Air National Guard were documented by local photographers as departing Moron Air Base in southern Spain, having been deployed from Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
They flew over the Mediterranean and landed in Qatar, despite their usual deployment base to the region being Al Dhafra in UAE, according to The Aviationist.
Four F-22s prepare to depart from Moron AB in Spain on Jun. 27, 2019. Via “DM Parody www.dotcom.gi/photos“/The Aviationist.
This suggests the Pentagon is still on a war footing with Iran, positioning forces and advanced stealth fighters to have maximum readiness should hostilities break out.
Departing USAF’s Moron AB in Spain to fly to Qatar.
Early last month the US deployed a group of B-52 strategic bombers as part of in response to what the Defense Department described as “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” related to Iran, as well as the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf region.
Since then it’s been nothing but escalation following alleged tanker attacks as well as the recent US drone shoot down by Iran’s military.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IX52ev Tyler Durden
The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome. — Wikipedia
On this day in history, June 28, 1914, 105 years ago to the day, the driver for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made a wrong turn onto Franzjosefstrasse in Sarajevo.
Just hours earlier, Franz Ferdinand narrowly escaped assassination as a bomb bounced off his car as he and his wife, Sophie, traveled from the local train station to the city’s civic city. Rather than making the wrong turn onto Franz Josef Street, the car was supposed to travel on the river expressway allowing for a higher speed ensuring the Archduke’s safety.
Yet, somehow, the driver made a fatal mistake and tuned onto Franz Josef Street.
The 19-year-old anarchist and Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, who was part of a small group who had traveled to Sarajevo to kill the Archduke, and a cohort of the earlier bomb thrower, was on his way home thinking the plot had failed. He stopped for a sandwich on Franz Josef Street.
Seeing the driver of the Archduke’s car trying to back up onto the river expressway, Princip seized the opportunity and fired into the car, shooting Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point-blank range, killing both.
That small wrong turn, aminor perturbation to the initial conditions, or deviation from the original plan, set off the chain events that led to World War I.
Stumbling Into The Great War
Fearing Russian support of Serbia, Franz Josef would not retaliate by invading Serbia unless he was assured he had the backing of Germany. It is uncertain as to whether the Kaiser gave Franz Josef Germany’s unequivocal support. Russia, fearing Germany would intervene, mobilized its troops forcing Germany’s hand.
The great European powers thus stumbled into a war they didn’t want through complicated entanglements and alliances, and miscalculation. Russia backing Serbia; France aligned with Russia, Germany backing the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and Britain, who really didn’t have a dog in the fight except for her economic interests, aligned with France and Russia.
Later the U.S. would enter the war due to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare threatening American merchant ships and the Kaiser floating the idea of an alliance with Mexico in the famous Zimmerman Telegram, which was intercepted by the British.
Of course, some will argue that the Great War in Europe was inevitable
The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man most responsible for the unification of Germany in 1871, was quoted as saying at the end of his life that “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” It went as he predicted. – History.com
Nevertheless, maybe the course of history would have been different if not for that wrong turn on June 28, 1914, which created the humongous butterfly effect, which we still are experiencing the consequence to this very day.
The botched Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds the for World II. The War contributed to the Russian revolution and eventually the Cold War. The redrawing of borders in the Middle East after the Great War created the conditions for the instability and breakdown into tribalism the region still experiences today.
A map marked with crude chinagraph-pencil in the second decade of the 20th Century shows the ambition – and folly – of the 100-year old British-French plan that helped create the modern-day Middle East.
Straight lines make uncomplicated borders. Most probably that was the reason why most of the lines that Mark Sykes, representing the British government, and Francois Georges-Picot, from the French government, agreed upon in 1916 were straight ones. — BBC News
If Franz Ferdinand had not been murdered on this day in history, that conflict between the Serbs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire may have been contained to just the Balkans. Maybe.
The butterfly effect. Think of how many small events, decisions, mistakes, one small turn, or “minor perturbation” in plans have had enormous consequences in your own personal life.
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Update: It is the rising geopolitical risks, rapidly shifting global economic tectonic plates, and collapsing post-war global order that keeps us up at night and pose the greatest threat to the world economy and stock markets.
We believe the probability of a major bear market — down 40 percent plus — in the next 6-12 months is much, much higher and a galaxy away from most traders and investors’ radars.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Xbj1Ry Tyler Durden
