President Trump met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other company executives on Tuesday in a closed-door meeting first reported by VICE. Word of the meeting was circulated in an internal email at Twitter obtained by the news outlet.
Trump tweeted a picture of the meeting on Tuesday afternoon, noting that there were “Lots of subjects discussed regarding their platform, and the world of social media in general,” and that Trump looks forward to “keeping an open dialogue!”
Great meeting this afternoon at the @WhiteHouse with @Jack from @Twitter. Lots of subjects discussed regarding their platform, and the world of social media in general. Look forward to keeping an open dialogue! pic.twitter.com/QnZi579eFb
According to the internal email, the meeting was going to be about “the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” according to Vijaya Gadde – Twitter’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety.
“As you know, I believe that conversation, not silence, bridges gaps and drives towards solutions,” wrote Dorsey in the email thread. “I have met with every world leader who has extended an invitation to me, and I believe the discussions have been productive, and the outcomes meaningful.”
Some Twitter employees will likely take issue with their CEO meeting President Trump. Dorsey addresses this directly in the email, adding, “Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all. In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas.” –VICE
We wonder if they discussed the rampant censorship of conservatives – and noticed that Trump’s 2020 campaign manager and noted expert in the field Brad Parscale wasn’t pictured in the meeting.
Two of the most important problems that the so-called Green New Deal will attempt to solve at the cost of incalculable trillions are global warming and its consequences, including drought, famine, floods and massive starvation. You may recall that Obama in his 2015 State of the Union speech declared that the greatest threat facing us was neither terrorism nor ISIS. It wasn’t nuclear weapons in rogue states either. “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Obama.
His entire administration including Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State John Kerry, frequently repeated the claim that climate change was the greatest threat facing the world. It was a sentiment Obama stressed again during an Earth Day trip to the Florida Everglades where he said, “This is not a problem for another generation. It has serious implications for the way we live right now”.
More recently, presidential hopefuls like Beto O’Rourke, along with most Democrat candidates, declared their zealous support for the Green New Deal in forecasting that the world will end in 12 years if nothing is done.
“This is the final chance, the scientists are absolutely unanimous on this — that we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis. Not to be melodramatic, but the future of the world depends on us right now here where we are.”
This leads to the question I pose in this brief, data-driven, essay: What kind of track record do the politicians and their experts have in their climate predictions? After all, some of these predictions were made 10, 20 or even 50 years ago. Can’t we now look back at their predictions and begin to hold them accountable?
As others have done, I have chosen to begin with the first Earth Day “Celebration” in 1970. Now who can be against Earth Day? It’s a charming idea, and I have been an enthusiastic supporter since my college days in Ann Arbor, when we celebrated the event on the campus of the University of Michigan.
Here’s what the experts were saying almost a half century ago on Earth Day, 1970:
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
— Harvard biologist George Wald
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
— Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human
abitation.”
— Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100–200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. … Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. … [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
— Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions …. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
— North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable. … By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate … that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any. … The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
Global Warming and Massive Starvation
I will focus my attention on the two most important predictions: Global Warming and Massive Starvation. If we return to the failed prediction of global cooling noted above, we can put the temperature data in a wider perspective. NASA data show that a period of warming in the 1920’s and 30’s was followed by two or three decades of cooling temperatures, from the 1940s to 1970. At that time many experts, including Carl Sagan, warned us of a possible ice age—only to have the climate change on them. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, scientists began to record slightly warmer temperatures. Curiously, as we look back at this period NASA sounded the alarm for global warming while a short time later the New York Times cited NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] data showing no warming over the past 100 years in the US.
Since then, group think and political correctness, plus rewards in government grants and university promotions, have created incentives for nearly everyone to jump onto the current bandwagon of projecting an escalating warming trend. Once again we came back to the doomsday scenario that characterized 1970’s.
Then, out of the blue, the darned climate changed again. Global temperature data has been roughly flat since about 1998, even cooling by .056 degrees C from February 2016 to February 2018, according to official NASA global temperature data. Of course, this is just a two-year trend.
You may have noticed that nearly all of the doomsday theories seem to begin with the phrase, “if current trends continue.” But, as I have just reviewed, current trends don’t continue. Global temperatures go down, then up, then stay flat. Population growth tapers off, new oil reserves are discovered, agricultural yields increase at even higher rates. Doomsday forecasters always overestimate gloomy trends and underestimate human ingenuity in problem solving.
This raises the question: How would an informed citizen make sense of our current predicament?
Without question there has been an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. A majority of scientists believe this to be the primary source of the global warming that has occurred.
Just how much warming has occurred?
The scientific consensus is that the average temperature of the Earth has risen about 0.4 °C over the past 100 years. This is far less than experts predicted. And therein lies the problem: scientists are better at observation than prediction.
A case in point: experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate carrying out global warming research have now predicted that average global temperatures could increase between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by the year 2100. Notice the nearly 5-fold difference between the conservative and more liberal (one is tempted to say “progressive”) estimates. This strikes me as akin to meteorologists predicting tomorrow’s high as somewhere between 40 and 80 degrees. Not much of a forecast if you are trying to decide whether to head to the beach or not. The confidence interval seems pretty safe, but the precision leaves much to be desired. Just how much faith should one put in such projections, given the flawed models and track record of failed predictions?
Regarding the other staggering Earth Day forecast of widespread starvation into hundreds of millions, recent satellite data from NASA and NOAA offer a compelling explanation for the spectacular failure of these predictions.
Almost half of Earth’s vegetated lands have shown significant greening over the past 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions.
This greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States, or more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year, compared to the early 2000’s. That increase represents an enormous amount of food to feed a hungry planet, which is one reason the Earth Day predictions of mass starvation never materialized.
Because the mainstream media refuses to report such important data as this is from NASA and NOAA that do not support their doomsday narrative, I have never actually met anyone who knew anything about this when I mention it. I only learned about this myself a few years ago because ofMatt Ridley, whose excellent blog I recommend without reserve:
You may remember from high school biology that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth. Green leaves use energy from sunlight through photosynthesis to chemically combine carbon dioxide with nitrogen drawn in from the air with water and nutrients tapped from the ground to produce sugars, which are the main source of food, fiber and fuel for life on Earth. The good news is that the impact that this greening has had in reducing hunger and starvation around the globe is undiminished, despite going unreported. When is the last time you heard a report of massive human starvation of hundreds of millions, or even tens of milions. How about 1 million … do I hear a hundred thousand, anyone? Anyone?
This is clearly the opposite of what you hear from the mainstream media, which loves to provide as much coverage as possible of one disaster after another. A more rational analysis would examine the average number of deaths per decade from 1920-1917. But this would show a “huuuge” decline in deaths caused by climate change, and we can’t have that now can we? The data below are from the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database.
In contrast to the dire Earth Day predictions of 1970, climate-related deaths have been declining strongly for 70 years. Notice that this decline in the absolute number deaths occurred while the global population increased four-fold. Thus, the individual risk of dying from climate-related disasters has declined almost 99% from the 1920s to the present day. Our increased wealth and technological capacity to respond to natural disasters has greatly reduced our collective human climate vulnerability – Good news for rational beings, bad news for Democrat candidates.
Part 2 to follow…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UQJyaM Tyler Durden
The jury has rendered its verdict: plastic is polluting our oceans, and it’s a problem. But it’s one that won’t be solved by straw bans or prohibitions on single-use plastics.
Yet California is poised to do just that with Assembly Bill 1162, which would require that hotels and miscellaneous vacation rentals phase out small plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion by January 1, 2023. Instead, they’ll need to opt for refillable dispensers or containers that hold 12 or more ounces of product.
“We know we have an enormous problem with our world, we’ve become addicted to [plastic] and it’s caused a major dilemma environmentally,” Democratic Assemblymember Ash Kalra (District 27), who introduced the legislation, told ABC News.
He isn’t wrong. A great deal of the plastic panic centers around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the infamous and mammoth collection of trash floating between Hawaii and California. Its discovery in 1997 and the years-long news coverage that followed prompted a worldwide frenzy to declutter the oceans. Measuring more than 1.6 million square kilometers (and growing), it is more than three times the size of France, and more than twice the size of Texas.
But it isn’t dominated by plastic straws, bags, or erstwhile shampoo bottles. The vast majority of the debris is composed of fishing-related accessories, like nets, ropes, and baskets. An estimated 20 percent came from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
So what about those single-use plastic items—from water bottles to straws to bags—that have drummed up such animus among environmentalists and animal lovers alike? Approximately 40 percent of plastics are produced for such purposes, according to a study by Roland Geyer, a professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara and supporter of California’s hotel plastic ban bill.
Precisely how much of that ends up in the ocean is unclear. But recent data show that 60 percent of mismanaged plastic waste, which often makes its way into the water, comes from East Asia and the Pacific. North America—which typically processes its waste quite efficiently—has less than 1 percent.
We do know that 8 million tons of plastic in total enters the ocean annually. A hefty chunk of that comes from microplastics: tiny pieces of debris that measure less than five millimeters long. Those are often digested by birds and fish. The thought is a queasy one, particularly when considering that those animals make it onto many a dinner plate, pushing the carcinogenic substance back up the food chain. But it’s a misconception that single-use plastics are pushing that problem—most microplastics come from the breakdown of synthetic car tires and from washing synthetic clothes.
That California’s bill will have little tangible impact is not lost on its supporters. “It’s mostly symbolic, but symbols can be powerful,” Geyer said. “Hopefully it will show consumers we can stop using plastic products and realize we won’t miss them.” But that symbol fails to capture the actual problem—which is one that has far more to do with abandoned fishing gear, synthetic fibers, and mismanaged waste in the developing world than it does with complimentary bottles of shampoo.
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The jury has rendered its verdict: plastic is polluting our oceans, and it’s a problem. But it’s one that won’t be solved by straw bans or prohibitions on single-use plastics.
Yet California is poised to do just that with Assembly Bill 1162, which would require that hotels and miscellaneous vacation rentals phase out small plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion by January 1, 2023. Instead, they’ll need to opt for refillable dispensers or containers that hold 12 or more ounces of product.
“We know we have an enormous problem with our world, we’ve become addicted to [plastic] and it’s caused a major dilemma environmentally,” Democratic Assemblymember Ash Kalra (District 27), who introduced the legislation, told ABC News.
He isn’t wrong. A great deal of the plastic panic centers around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the infamous and mammoth collection of trash floating between Hawaii and California. Its discovery in 1997 and the years-long news coverage that followed prompted a worldwide frenzy to declutter the oceans. Measuring more than 1.6 million square kilometers (and growing), it is more than three times the size of France, and more than twice the size of Texas.
But it isn’t dominated by plastic straws, bags, or erstwhile shampoo bottles. The vast majority of the debris is composed of fishing-related accessories, like nets, ropes, and baskets. An estimated 20 percent came from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
So what about those single-use plastic items—from water bottles to straws to bags—that have drummed up such animus among environmentalists and animal lovers alike? Approximately 40 percent of plastics are produced for such purposes, according to a study by Roland Geyer, a professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California and supporter of California’s hotel plastic ban bill.
Precisely how much of that ends up in the ocean is unclear. But recent data show that 60 percent of mismanaged plastic waste, which often makes its way into the water, comes from East Asia and the Pacific. North America—which typically processes its waste quite efficiently—has less than 1 percent.
We do know that 8 million tons of plastic in total enters the ocean annually. A hefty chunk of that comes from microplastics: tiny pieces of debris that measure less than five millimeters long. Those are often digested by birds and fish. The thought is a queasy one, particularly when considering that those animals make it onto many a dinner plate, pushing the carcinogenic substance back up the food chain. But it’s a misconception that single-use plastics are pushing that problem—most microplastics come from the breakdown of synthetic car tires and from washing synthetic clothes.
That California’s bill will have little tangible impact is not lost on its supporters. “It’s mostly symbolic, but symbols can be powerful,” Geyer said. “Hopefully it will show consumers we can stop using plastic products and realize we won’t miss them.” But that symbol fails to capture the actual problem—which is one that has far more to do with abandoned fishing gear, synthetic fibers, and mismanaged waste in the developing world than it does with complimentary bottles of shampoo.
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Thanks to the Wall Street Journal, investors won’t need to wait until later this week for a promised update on the status of merger talks between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Based on reports about Deutsche’s continued contingency planning, we can surmise that the answer to the question ‘how are deal talks going?’ is clearly ‘not well’.
Fresh on the heels of reports that Deutsche CEO Christian Sewing has been scrambling to prep a ‘Plan B’ to sell to investors should the merger between the two troubled German lenders fall through, WSJ reported on Tuesday that part of this planning includes the possibility of forming a ‘bad bank’ to house Deutsche’s most toxic assets and unprofitable business lines.
Deutsche’s troubles have persisted for years. So why are they only discussing this now? Well, because, as WSJ reports, Deutsche’s troubled investment bank is creating more headaches during the merger talks than executives had initially anticipated, which seems more like an issue of unrealistically rosy expectations than anything else.
Deutsche Bank for years has been retooling its strategy and management, promising to reinvigorate profits, repair compliance weaknesses and cut rising costs. Executives insisted publicly up until late 2018 that the bank should only consider deals after it heals itself. Now, deep into merger talks, it is looking at a potentially bigger cleanup effort than it previously signaled.
Planning for a possible no-deal outcome has taken on greater urgency at Deutsche Bank as merger talks have proven more complicated than proponents originally expected, the people said.
Of course, even if Deutsche follows through with these plans, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a merger will be dead in the water. It could even help facilitate a deal.
A new unit for disposing of assets and discontinued operations – a so-called bad bank – could be used flexibly, whether Deutsche Bank strikes a deal or not, some of the people said. A merger would likely require Deutsche Bank to make sizable cuts to parts of its investment bank, narrowing the scope of businesses to focus resources on more-profitable areas as part of a strategy overhaul, some of the people said.
But as major DB shareholders have demanded cuts to its investment bank, particularly its troubled US equity trading franchise, and to a lesser extent its European equity trading business, it’s looking increasingly likely that DB is going to need to find a way to quickly shed its most problematic businesses and assets – or at least find a way to cleave them from the rest of the bank.
DB has tried the ‘bad bank’ model before with its infamous ‘noncore operations’ unit. But the fact that this is again under discussion shows just how difficult it will be for Deutsche to rid itself of these assets and businesses.
A new bad-bank unit would allow Deutsche Bank to wall off business lines it intends to close or de-emphasize as well as positions that take time to sell or run down. Deutsche Bank previously had a similar unit called noncore operations that it used to dispose of unwanted assets, many of them dating to the financial crisis. That loss-making unit reported revenues and other financial details distinct from the bank’s core businesses.
Deutsche Bank closed the noncore unit in late 2016. In March 2017, the bank launched a share sale to raise €8 billion in capital. In the process, it designated a new pile of around €20 billion in risk-weighted assets as “nonstrategic.” They were earmarked to be run down within the investment bank rather than as a new separate unit.
The return of discussions about a noncore unit highlight Deutsche Bank’s continued difficulties in streamlining and cutting costs to focus on businesses where it has a competitive edge.
With more stakeholders – including the two banks’ powerful unions – opposing the deal, it’s hardly a surprise that German Finance minister Olaf Scholz’s quest to create a German ‘national champion’ to support Germany’s exporters appears to be in serious jeopardy.
Earlier, the FT reported the UBS was in talks to fold its asset-management unit into DB’s majority-owned asset-management subsidiary DWS, the most profitable of the bank’s businesses (though it’s technically a separate company).
Meanwhile, twitter wits couldn’t help but crack a few well-deserved jokes after seeing the WSJ headline flash.
“If Republicans continue to cower to the NRA,” says Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris, she will impose new gun controls by “executive action.” If Congress does not change the law, in other words, Harris will, although that is not part of the president’s constitutional job description.
The California senator’s campaign website promises that “if Congress fails to send comprehensive gun safety legislation to Harris’ desk within her first 100 days as president—including universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill—she will take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.” Harris does not claim that as president she could unilaterally ban “assault weapons” or repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. But she does claim she could change the law in two other significant ways.
Harris thinks the president can “mandate near-universal background checks by requiring anyone who sells five or more guns per year to run a background check on all gun sales.” Since only federally licensed dealers are legally required to run background checks, such a rule would require dramatically expanding that category.
The problem is that federal law defines a gun dealer as someone who is “engaged in the business of selling firearms,” which in turn is defined as a “devot[ing] time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” The statutory definition explicitly excludes “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.” Under Kamala’s plan, a hobbyist or collector who sold more than four guns in a single year would be required to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks, which is plainly inconsistent with current law.
Likewise Harris’ plan to “close the ‘boyfriend loophole’ to prevent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing guns.” Under current law, people convicted of misdemeanors involving “domestic violence” are barred from possessing firearms. But crimes against dating partners count as “domestic violence” only if the perpetrator has lived with the victim or produced a child with him or her. The House version of the bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act would eliminate those requirements. Harris seems to think she can accomplish the same thing without new congressional action, but it’s hard to see how. Congress has defined “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” and only Congress can change the definition.
In trying to impose new gun restrictions by presidential fiat, Harris would be taking a page from Donald Trump, who demanded an administrative ban on “bump stocks” that required twisting the statutory definition of machine guns beyond recognition. Barack Obama also tried to expand gun control without congressional approval, although his administration did not go nearly as far as Harris proposes, and it recognized that banning bump stocks was inconsistent with existing law. It is telling that Harris believes voters who are appalled by Trump’s power grabs would welcome a Democratic president who thinks she can ignore the law as long as they like her policies.
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“If Republicans continue to cower to the NRA,” says Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris, she will impose new gun controls by “executive action.” If Congress does not change the law, in other words, Harris will, although that is not part of the president’s constitutional job description.
The California senator’s campaign website promises that “if Congress fails to send comprehensive gun safety legislation to Harris’ desk within her first 100 days as president—including universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill—she will take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.” Harris does not claim that as president she could unilaterally ban “assault weapons” or repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. But she does claim she could change the law in two other significant ways.
Harris thinks the president can “mandate near-universal background checks by requiring anyone who sells five or more guns per year to run a background check on all gun sales.” Since only federally licensed dealers are legally required to run background checks, such a rule would require dramatically expanding that category.
The problem is that federal law defines a gun dealer as someone who is “engaged in the business of selling firearms,” which in turn is defined as a “devot[ing] time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” The statutory definition explicitly excludes “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.” Under Kamala’s plan, a hobbyist or collector who sold more than four guns in a single year would be required to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks, which is plainly inconsistent with current law.
Likewise Harris’ plan to “close the ‘boyfriend loophole’ to prevent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing guns.” Under current law, people convicted of misdemeanors involving “domestic violence” are barred from possessing firearms. But crimes against dating partners count as “domestic violence” only if the perpetrator has lived with the victim or produced a child with him or her. The House version of the bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act would eliminate those requirements. Harris seems to think she can accomplish the same thing without new congressional action, but it’s hard to see how. Congress has defined “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” and only Congress can change the definition.
In trying to impose new gun restrictions by presidential fiat, Harris would be taking a page from Donald Trump, who demanded an administrative ban on “bump stocks” that required twisting the statutory definition of machine guns beyond recognition. Barack Obama also tried to expand gun control without congressional approval, although his administration did not go nearly as far as Harris proposes, and it recognized that banning bump stocks was inconsistent with existing law. It is telling that Harris believes voters who are appalled by Trump’s power grabs would welcome a Democratic president who thinks she can ignore the law as long as they like her policies.
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Submitted by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner of WirePoints
You can’t help but call it a Ponzi scheme. Not if you look at Chicago’s collapsing demographics and consider how they’re threatening the solvency of the city’s government-run pensions. Chicago households are on the hook for more than $145 billion in state and local retirement debts and there are fewer and fewer people left to pay them.
Consider first Chicago’s falling population. The city’s metropolitan population has fallen four years in a row. It’s the only top-ten city to shrink like that. In all, the Chicago MSA lost 66,000 people between 2014 and 2018.
A falling population means the city’s massive pension debts are falling on a smaller base of taxpayers. That’s bad news enough.
But another key demographic – the ratio of active government workers to pensioners – is even more concerning.
That ratio, which equaled 1.4 actives for every pensioner in 2005, has collapsed to nearly 1.05. And if the trend continues, in just a year or two there will be more pensioners draining money from the pension funds than active workers putting money in.
The problem is compounded by the fact Chicago households can’t afford the amount of pension debt that’s been racked up by state and local politicians.
Spread out the $145 billion in overlapping government pension and retiree health care debt – from the city, the Chicago Public Schools, Cook County governments and the state – and each Chicago household is, on average, on the hook for more than $139,000 each. It’s an insane amount and it’s tabulated in the following graphic. (Retirement debt calculations are shown based on both official and Moody’s-based estimates.)
What’s fascinating is that Illinois politicians think Chicagoans will willingly pay off that debt no matter what.
They’re oblivious to the fact that more residents may just choose to slip right over the border. It’s a rare case where you can simply walk away from a massive debt without being arrested and/or having your assets taken away from you.
Illinois politicians are also arrogant enough to think that out-of-staters will continue to move into Chicago and just assume new debts the size of a mortgage, but with nothing to show for it.
Chicago’s pension plans are already deeply in debt and functionally bankrupt. That’s particularly true for the municipal, police and fire pension funds, which are about one-quarter funded.
A recent analysis by Wirepoints found that at the end of 2017, the police fund had only enough assets cover the next four years of payouts. In contrast, the fund’s assets in 2000 were enough to cover the following 13 years of payouts.
Chicago is losing the demographics game as its retirement debts get ever-bigger. It’s hard not to call this a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Illinois politicians. The question is, how fast does it fall apart?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GxUEHu Tyler Durden
WTI surged once again to its highest settlement price in over six months (even as the dollar spiked) as Saudi Arabia was said to be tentative about raising output to mute the impacts of American sanctions against Iran.
“It’s been made clear that Trump is very serious about enforcement of the sanctions,” said said Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. “The question is how much will their exports fall versus how much and how quickly can Saudi Arabia and other producers increase?”
American pressure on Iran’s exports won’t work, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told his parliament. “We will act wholeheartedly to break the U.S. sanctions,” he said.
But for now, all eyes are on inventories…
API
Crude +6.86mm (+500k exp)
Cushing -389k
Gasoline +2.163mm (-1.82mm exp) – first build in 10 weeks
Distillates -865k (-712k exp)
After last week’s surprise crude draw, expectations were for a modest build in the last week but API reported a much bigger than expected rise in inventories of 6.86mm… Gasoline also surprised with a sizable build – the first in 10 weeks
WTI hovered around $66.30 ahead of the inventory data and kneejerked lower
How long will Trump stand for soaring gasoline prices? Prices at the pump are the highest since 2014 for this time of year…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2PoXkLP Tyler Durden
China’s Skynet and Sharp Eyes projects aim to comprehensively surveil China’s 1.4 billion people by 2020 through a network of 626 million video cameras stationed in public spaces monitored using facial recognition technologies optimized via artificial intelligence. These vast video surveillance systems will help enforce the Chinese government’s social credit system that awards points to citizens who behave and docks those who commit crimes, fail to pay bills, or criticize the communist regime. Folks who get put on the government’s “List of Untrustworthy Persons” due to their low scores are forbidden from purchasing such items as high-speed rail and air tickets or hotel rooms, among other punishments. Five million people have been barred from high-speed trains and 17 million from flights under the scheme, according to Time magazine.
Although it is hard to gauge real public sentiment in authoritarian China, there is some evidence that many Chinese citizens feel safer knowing that Big Brother is watching over them. On the other hand, The New York Timesreports in an article published as part of its superb Privacy Project that the Chinese government has built out a video surveillance system designed to ethnically profile and track millions of its restive Uighur citizens. This is possible because Central Asian Uighurs in general look somewhat differently from China’s majority Han population.
“The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review,” reports the Times. “The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.”
Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law told the Times,”If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”
To see how effective facial recognition video surveillance might be in the United States, the Times ran a test using off-the-shelf Amazon facial recognition technology to filter images captured from video cameras located in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library’s main branch. The Times ran the Bryant Park images through a database it built using public photos of people who work in the area. The result:
Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.
Spied in Bryant Park
As government and private face databases expand and real time video detection accuracy improves, the cost of tracking us will fall ever lower. The Times notes that New York city police have access to 9,000 camera feeds in lower Manhattan alone. Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that because of how quickly the technology has advanced, she would now support a wholesale ban on government use of facial recognition.
In the Times’ article detailing how the Chinese government uses facial recognition to monitor the Uighurs, MIT artificial intelligence researcher Jonathan Frankle warned, “I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy. Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”
Yes it is.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2DtbhDq
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