Ted Cruz got his biggest loser speech in early this evening, just before the polls closed at 8pmET, jabbing at Trump being "Hillary's running mate" and "the only candidate that Hillary could beat." Ironically, Cruz blamed the media for getting excited about Trump's victories tonight…
But the rant rang dull as his speech was rudely interrupted by the actual results. As expected Donald Trump took Connecticut, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, with Rhode Island and Delware too early to call for now. NBC also projects Hillary to win Maryland. As Goldman warns the rest of the fields: "There isn’t that much left on the table between today's contests and June 7."
*CLINTON PROJECTED TO WIN MARYLAND DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY: NBC
Before the results started to roll in, this is where they stood…
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Finally, here is Goldman summarizing the situation from here…
After a brief period of uncertainty following the Wisconsin primary earlier this month, the Republican nomination once again looks like it is Mr. Trump’s to lose, while Sec. Clinton appears to have a tight grip on her party’s nomination and could clinch it outright (including “superdelegates” in the total) before the last of the contests in June.
Trump looks very likely to win all five states; the main uncertainty at this point is whether he will win sufficient delegates to put him on track to clinch a majority of delegates prior to the Republican convention that starts July 18. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island go to the polls, with 118 Republican delegates at stake. Our expectation, based on polling in the states and each state’s primary rules, is that Mr. Trump is likely to win slightly less than 100 of the delegates in play.
Coordination between Gov. Kasich and Sen. Cruz might make a difference in Indiana, though Mr. Trump still looks like the narrow favorite there. Sen. Cruz and Gov. Kasich appear to be coordinating their campaign strategies, with Gov. Kasich shifting resources out of Indiana, and Sen. Cruz suggesting he will not focus on New Mexico or Oregon. The contest in Indiana does indeed look close — Mr. Trump leads Sen. Cruz by an average of 39% to 33% in an average of the only three polls in the state, conducted last week; Gov. Kasich is farther behind at around 19%. If enough support shifts to Sen. Cruz, it is possible that he could take the 30 delegates that Indiana will award to the statewide winner, plus a fraction of the additional 27 delegates split among the winners of the 9 congressional districts. However, “strategic voting” seems unreliable. When Sen. Rubio attempted something similar in urging his Ohio supporters to vote for Gov. Kasich, his actual vote share came in 4pp below his prior level of support, or a decline of slightly more than half. But the political and ideological differences between Sen. Cruz and Gov. Kasich are much greater than between Sen. Rubio and Gov. Kasich. Moreover, while the intent of the strategy seems clear enough, Gov. Kasich stopped short of actually instructing supporters to vote for Sen. Cruz.
Whatever the outcome in Indiana next week (May 3), Oregon and New Mexico will probably be less consequential. Although Sen. Cruz has suggested he will shift resources out of Oregon (May 17) and New Mexico (June 7), it might not make that much of a difference. These are among the few states left that allocate their delegates in proportion to the statewide result, so even if Gov. Kasich were to deny Mr. Trump a win in either state, it probably would make only a small dent in the delegate count.
There isn’t that much left on the table between today's contests and June 7. A few other states vote in May, but these contests look unlikely to change the outlook significantly. Nebraska (May 10), Montana, and South Dakota (both June 7) look likely to award Sen. Cruz all of their combined 92 delegates. New Jersey (June 7) awards all of its 51 delegates to the statewide winner, and Mr. Trump seems to have a sizeable advantage there. West Virginia (May 10) has an unusual system that looks likely to award a substantial share of delegates to Trump while possibly also producing some unbound delegates. Washington State (May 27) is a bit of a mystery at this stage due to a lack of polls; it awards its statewide delegates proportionally so it might make slightly less of a difference in the delegate math in any case. Overall, we expect that Trump will win around half of the 199 delegates up for grabs in May, suggesting that the risks are fairly evenly balanced in next month’s contests.
The outlook in California (June 7) will quickly become a focus. Polling since the start of the month in California shows Mr. Trump averaging 46% support, well above Sen. Cruz’s 25% and Gov. Kasich’s 19%. However, while California awards 3 delegates to the winner of each congressional district (159 in total) like several other states, it awards a disproportionately small number to the statewide winner (13 delegates, which is the same number Rhode Island awards to the statewide winner, for example). This is important because even if Trump wins the majority in the state as a whole, he is apt to lose delegates to Gov. Kasich and Sen. Cruz in some congressional districts. We assume that he will win around 100 of the 172 California delegates in our illustrative delegate count (Exhibit 1) but there is obviously a good deal of uncertainty in these later races.
The outcome of the Republican nomination looks unlikely to become clear until the convention. If Trump fails to win 1237 delegates in the contests through June 7, his remaining option to secure the nomination would be to win the support of unbound delegates before or even during the convention, which starts July 18. Under the hypothetical delegate scenario illustrated in Exhibit 1 where Trump wins around 1200 of the delegates but falls short of a majority, he would need to work to gain the support of another 37 or more unbound delegates, out of around 150 total. However, a number of these delegates have already announced their support for other candidates (e.g., Sen. Cruz), leaving a smaller pool for Trump to draw from. The primary results in Pennsylvania could shed some light on this question; Pennsylvania will send 54 unbound delegates to the convention—the largest amount from any single state—and some Pennsylvania delegates have suggested they might feel obliged to support their state’s winner (though others have already announced support for a candidate regardless of the results). We would expect to see additional scrutiny of these delegates’ intentions in coming days.
Three weeks ago we reported an amusing anecdote out of China in which robot waiters in a Guangzhou restaurant had been “fired” because whencustomers flocked to the Heweilai Restaurant chain in the southern Chinese city, they found they were not all they are cracked up to be. “A staff member said the robots couldn’t effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also said the robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table.”
“The robots weren’t able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again,” said one employee.
We joked in the summary saying that “for now, it appears, China’s minimum wage workers, and it has a few hundred million of those, will not be phased out just yet.”
We may have been premature.
According to a report released by the MIT Technology Review, where some saw failure in China’s “novelty” worker robots, the Chinese government saw nothing less than the opportunity to perfect what will soon put million of Chinese workers out of a job: an army of worker robots.
Because while there is certanly humor to be found in the anecdote about a robot “termination”, the Chinese government is keen to change this.
On March 16, officials approved the latest Five Year Plan for China’s economy, which is reported to include an initiative that will make billions of yuan available for manufacturers to upgrade to technologies including advanced machinery and robots. The government also plans to create dozens of innovation centers across the country to showcase advanced manufacturing technologies. Some regional authorities in China have been especially bold in their own efforts. Last year the government of Guangdong, a province that contains many large manufacturing operations, promised to spend $150 billion equipping factories with industrial robots and creating two new centers dedicated to advanced automation.
The goal is to overtake Germany, Japan, and the United States in terms of manufacturing sophistication by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. To make that happen, the government needs Chinese manufacturers to adopt robots by the millions. It also wants Chinese companies to start producing more of these robots.
That is just the beginning.
The transition from human to robot workers may upend Chinese society. Some displaced factory workers could find employment in the service sector, but not all of the 100 million now employed in factories will find such jobs a good match. So a sudden shift toward robots and automation could cause economic hardship and social unrest. “You can make the argument that robotic technology is the way to save manufacturing in China,” says Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “But China also has a huge labor force. What are you going to do with them?”
For now, that question remains unanswered, but that won’t stop from unleashing the biggest robotic revolution seen in recent years.
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This is the story of how China plans to achieve its goal of creating a robotic workforce as told by MIT’s Will Knight.
China Is Building a Robot Army of Model Workers
Inside a large, windowless room in an electronics factory in south Shanghai, about 15 workers are eyeing a small robot arm with frustration. Near the end of the production line where optical networking equipment is being packed into boxes for shipping, the robot sits motionless.
“The system is down,” explains Nie Juan, a woman in her early 20s who is responsible for quality control. Her team has been testing the robot for the past week. The machine is meant to place stickers on the boxes containing new routers, and it seemed to have mastered the task quite nicely. But then it suddenly stopped working. “The robot does save labor,” Nie tells me, her brow furrowed, “but it is difficult to maintain.”
The hitch reflects a much bigger technological challenge facing China’s manufacturers today. Wages in Shanghai have more than doubled in the past seven years, and the company that owns the factory, Cambridge Industries Group, faces fierce competition from increasingly high-tech operations in Germany, Japan, and the United States. To address both of these problems, CIG wants to replace two-thirds of its 3,000 workers with machines this year. Within a few more years, it wants the operation to be almost entirely automated, creating a so-called “dark factory.” The idea is that with so few people around, you could switch the lights off and leave the place to the machines.
But as the idle robot arm on CIG’s packaging line suggests, replacing humans with machines is not an easy task. Most industrial robots have to be extensively programmed, and they will perform a job properly only if everything is positioned just so. Much of the production work done in Chinese factories requires dexterity, flexibility, and common sense. If a box comes down the line at an odd angle, for instance, a worker has to adjust his or her hand before affixing the label. A few hours later, the same worker might be tasked with affixing a new label to a different kind of box. And the following day he or she might be moved to another part of the line entirely.
Despite the huge challenges, countless manufacturers in China are planning to transform their production processes using robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, they don’t really have a choice. Human labor in China is no longer as cheap as it once was, especially compared with labor in rival manufacturing hubs growing quickly in Asia. In Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, factory wages can be less than a third of what they are in the urban centers of China. One solution, many manufacturers—and government officials—believe, is to replace human workers with machines.
The results of this effort will be felt globally. Almost a quarter of the world’s products are made in China today. If China can use robots and other advanced technologies to retool types of production never before automated, that might turn the country, now the world’s sweatshop, into a hub of high-tech innovation. Less clear, however, is how that would affect the millions of workers recruited to China’s booming factories.
There are still plenty of workers around now as I tour CIG’s factory with the company’s CEO, Gerald Wong, a compact man who earned degrees from MIT in the 1980s. We watch a team of people performing delicate soldering on circuit boards, and another group clicking circuit boards into plastic casings. Wong stops to demonstrate a task that is proving especially hard to automate: attaching a flexible wire to a circuit board. “It’s always curled differently,” he says with annoyance.
But there are some impressive examples of automation creeping through Wong’s factory, too. As we walk by a row of machines that stamp chips into circuit boards, a wheeled robot roughly the size of a mini-fridge rolls by ferrying components in the other direction. Wong steps in front of the machine to show me how it will detect him and stop. In another part of the factory, we watch a robot arm grab finished circuit boards from a conveyor belt and place them into a machine that automatically checks their software. Wong explains that his company is testing a robot that does the soldering work we saw earlier more quickly and reliably than a person.
After we finish the tour, he says, “It is very clear in China: people will either go into automation or they will go out of the manufacturing business.”
China’s economic miracle is directly attributable to its manufacturing industry. Approximately 100 million people are employed in manufacturing in China (in the U.S., the number is around 12 million), and the sector accounts for almost 36 percent of China’s gross domestic product. During the last few decades, manufacturing empires were forged around the Yangtze River Delta, Bohai Bay outside Beijing, and the Pearl River Delta in the south. Millions of low-skilled migrant workers found employment in gigantic factories, producing an unimaginable range of products, from socks to servers. China accounted for just 3 percent of global manufacturing output in 1990. Today it produces almost a quarter, including 80 percent of all air conditioners, 71 percent of all mobile phones, and 63 percent of the world’s shoes. For consumers around the world, this manufacturing boom has meant many low-cost products, from affordable iPhones to flat-screen televisions.
In recent years, though, China’s manufacturing engine has started to stall. Wages have increased at a crippling 12 percent per year on average since 2001. Chinese exports fell last year for the first time since the financial crisis of 2009. And toward the end of 2015 the Caixin Purchasing Managers’ Index, a widely used indicator of manufacturing activity, showed that the sector had contracted for the 10th month in a row. Just as China’s manufacturing boom fed the global economy, the prospect of its decline has already started to spook the world’s financial markets.
Automation appears to offer an enticing technological solution. China already imports a huge number of industrial robots, but the country lags far behind competitors in the ratio of robots to workers. In South Korea, for instance, there are 478 robots per 10,000 workers; in Japan the figure is 315; in Germany, 292; in the United States it is 164. In China that number is only 36.
The Chinese government is keen to change this. On March 16, officials approved the latest Five Year Plan for China’s economy, which is reported to include an initiative that will make billions of yuan available for manufacturers to upgrade to technologies including advanced machinery and robots. The government also plans to create dozens of innovation centers across the country to showcase advanced manufacturing technologies. Some regional authorities in China have been especially bold in their own efforts. Last year the government of Guangdong, a province that contains many large manufacturing operations, promised to spend $150 billion equipping factories with industrial robots and creating two new centers dedicated to advanced automation.
The goal is to overtake Germany, Japan, and the United States in terms of manufacturing sophistication by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. To make that happen, the government needs Chinese manufacturers to adopt robots by the millions. It also wants Chinese companies to start producing more of these robots.
Workers at CIG retrieve items from one of several mobile robots that ferry materials around the facility.
The hope is that this will create a virtuous cycle, helping to birth a new high-tech industry and inspiring innovations that could spill over from manufacturing into other sectors and products.
Introducing hordes of robot workers is hardly something that can be done overnight, however. That much is clear from the struggles faced by Foxconn, a $130 billion Taiwanese manufacturer famous for employing hundreds of thousands of workers in city-size factories—and for making, among other products, Apple’s iPhones. In 2011, Foxconn’s founder and CEO, Terry Gou, said he expected to have a million robots in his company’s plants by 2014. Three years later, the effort had proved more challenging than expected, and just a few tens of thousands of robots had been deployed.
Despite the challenges, Day Chia-peng, general manager of Foxconn’s automation technology development committee, says the company is automating a growing number of tasks on its lines. These include the manufacture of displays and printed circuit boards, although processes that involve bending or snapping components into place still pose challenges. The company is even exploring ways that products themselves can be redesigned to make automated manufacturing easier. And it recently said it will sell some of the robots it has developed in-house to other manufacturers.
The transition from human to robot workers may upend Chinese society. Some displaced factory workers could find employment in the service sector, but not all of the 100 million now employed in factories will find such jobs a good match. So a sudden shift toward robots and automation could cause economic hardship and social unrest. “You can make the argument that robotic technology is the way to save manufacturing in China,” says Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “But China also has a huge labor force. What are you going to do with them?”
Dancing bots
A few days before visiting CIG, I went to China’s first major robotics event, the World Robot Conference, held inside a vast exhibition hall located within Beijing’s Olympic Park. The city was in the grip of an unusually cold spell, and producing the electricity to meet its heating needs had resulted in lung-searing air pollution from nearby coal power plants. But the snow and smog had done nothing to deter hundreds of researchers and companies, and thousands of attendees, from coming to the event.
A CIG worker inspects a custom-made machine for building circuit boards.
First came a theatrical opening ceremony, during which a huge video wall showed innovations from China’s ancient history spliced, somewhat oddly, with clips of robots from science fiction movies. The guest list included several high-ranking Chinese politicians. Li Yuanchao, China’s vice president, read messages of congratulations from President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. The vice president said that investing in robotics research would not only feed the country’s manufacturing industry but encourage greater domestic innovation.
After watching several talks, I wandered past endless demos set up by robot companies and research institutes. I watched as an enormous industrial robot fitted with a fork-like appendage went through some sort of routine factory work at terrifying speed. Other demos were more whimsical, like a small industrial machine performing a mesmerizing rendition of a traditional Chinese dragon dance (in full costume), and a mobile robot equipped with two racquets playing badminton with excited attendees. A humanoid robot with flashing eyes was carrying a small automated vacuum cleaner around on a tray.
It was also possible to grasp just how ambitious China will be in trying to replace human workers in its factories. HIT Robot Group, a company affiliated with one of the country’s foremost technical universities, Harbin Institute of Technology, had mocked up a battery production line that itself seemed like one giant robot. Robotic vehicles ferried components between various manufacturing machines. The only spots for humans were inside a control room in the center and on a line where especially fiddly manual work needed to be done. I later learned that HIT estimates the new factory could reduce human labor by as much as 85 percent.
But it was also evident that as a country with a history of seemingly endless cheap labor, China had to date been outpaced in the robot revolution. Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based company, was showing off a pair of flexible and intelligent industrial machines. Unlike conventional industrial robots, these products, called Baxter and Sawyer, require very little programming, and they are equipped with sensors that allow them to recognize objects and avoid hitting people. They also cost between $20,000 and $30,000 instead of the hundreds of thousands typical of an industrial robot. Speaking to me after the event, Rethink founder and robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks said that China represents a huge potential market for his company, which recently opened offices in Shanghai. Chinese robot makers are likely to start making more flexible and intelligent robots, too. But for now their products lag behind those of Western manufacturers.
“A game we often play when we go to a trade show in the Far East is we go and see the industrial robots from little companies and say, ‘Oh, that’s a copy of that, and that’s a copy of that,’” Brooks said. It will, he suggested, take time for China’s robotics companies to catch up.
Reinvented in China
To see for myself how far China’s researchers have to go, I visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions and home to China’s oldest academic robotics lab, founded in 1979. I found myself on a lush and sprawling campus in a quiet suburb in south Shanghai, surrounded by students cycling around on squeaky bicycles. There, I found a modern-looking building that housed the robotics lab.
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University are developing humanoid and walking robots
Zhu Xiangyang, a professor in his late 40s with thin glasses and a fleece sweater-vest, welcomed me to his office with tea and an irrepressible smile. The lab has a few dozen professors and research scientists and more than 100 doctoral and master’s students, and Zhu is justifiably proud of its research. In one room was a brain-controlled robotic wheelchair, operated by means of an electroencephalogram cap worn by a graduate student. A video showed a cyborg cockroach fitted with a wireless implant that connected to its peripheral nervous system and made it possible to control the creature’s movements from a computer. In another room, a researcher demonstrated snakelike and soft-bodied robots capable of reaching or crawling through narrow spaces. Inside a garage, a prototype self-driving car, not unlike one of Google’s, is being developed in collaboration with a Chinese carmaker called Chery.
Despite the impressive research projects at places like Jiao Tong, I kept wondering just how China will fulfill its manufacturing ambitions. Kai Yu is the founder of a startup called Horizon Robotics and was previously the head of an AI-focused research lab set up by Baidu, China’s dominant Internet company. Within the Baidu lab, Yu and colleagues were focused on a field of AI called deep learning, which involves training large simulated neural networks to recognize patterns in data. Researchers are now starting to explore how machine learning might make the next generation of industrial robots even smarter and more flexible. “In the future, what I see is China being more creative [in robotics],” Yu told me. “Original design, original ideas, but also some of the fundamental technologies, like deep learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence.”
Yu believes that the AI techniques developed by China’s big Internet companies for search, e-commerce, and other purposes could be applied to robots. “China has a very good opportunity to catch up,” he said. “The skills they have learned in the last five years can be transferred to making intelligent machines.”
When I later toured CIG’s factory, it wasn’t too hard to imagine how such advances could start feeding into Wong’s efforts to automate his operation. For one thing, a robot capable of learning and adapting presumably wouldn’t be baffled by a misaligned box that needs labeling.
After the tour, Wong took me through a PowerPoint presentation that laid out the company’s plan for the next few years, and then the conversation turned to intelligent robotics. “We’re going to use standard robots at first,” Wong said. “But then we’re going to use more advanced ones. More and more, we need to get into more advanced robotics. That can help make a dark factory.”
Given the economic imperative, the government’s determination, and the country’s growing technological sophistication, it seems very likely that manufacturing companies across China will automate successfully and that the country will become a leader in the technologies of advanced automation.
And yet it’s strange to think about the changes in store for Chinese manufacturing workers. At one point during our tour we had passed a group of about 20 people taking an afternoon break. Everyone was apparently snoozing, heads rested on arms folded in front of them. That’s hardly something a robot needs to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what will happen to these workers once robots have taken their jobs. Wong says they will most likely return to their hometowns and find employment there, on a farm or perhaps in a shop or restaurant. That may be so, but for some it won’t be so simple.
A week after leaving China, I received an e-mail from Wong with some more information about his plans, along with a characteristically bold promise. “Stay in touch,” he wrote. “We will make the dark factory happen.”
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And, as CNN shows in the clip below, it is well on its way.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is projected to win the Maryland primary
and with it, all 18 of the state’s delegates, according to MSNBC.
Also at stake tonight are the 31 delegates in Delaware, which is another winner-take-all state. The 118 delegates in Pennsylvania, the 70 in Connecticut, and the 33 in Rhode Island are allotted to the candidates proportionally.
(This post will be updated when the results of these primaries are called.)
At an MSNBC-hosted town hall last night, Clinton said she that didn’t feel the need to pivot any further to the left in order to placate Sanders’ supporters, and added that she hoped the democratic socialist would help her unite the party once he’s been fully vanquished.
“I did not put down conditions,” Clinton said of her eventual endorsement of then-Sen. Barack Obama after losing a bruising and interminable primary campaign to the freshman senator from Illinois. She added that she spent “an enormous amount of time” lobbying her supporters to vote for Obama in the general election and added:
I have a bigger lead in pledged delegates than Senator Obama, when I ran against him in 2008, ever had over me. I am winning…And I’m winning because of what I stand for and what I’ve done and what my ideas are.
Clinton is downplaying the rancor of 2008 a bit just a bit. A substantial group of her supporters dubbed themselves PUMAs (short for Party Unity My Ass) and threatened to vote for John McCain, even though Obama and Clinton were much more ideologically aligned than Clinton and Sanders will ever be.
What must be especially grating to Clinton is how hard she’s had to fight a guy who is not even really a member of her party and who despite presenting himself as the fresh face of progressivism, has been in Congress since before Bill Clinton was president. Add the fact he lacks the soaring rhetoric and charisma of the 2008-model Barack Obama, Clinton must be wondering why the hell her “inevitable” anointment as the party’s standard-bearer is taking so long.
The Clinton v. Sanders brawl of 2016 could have presented the Democratic Party with an opportunity to distinguish itself from the GOP by adopting a principled non-interventionist platform, but instead they’ll almost certainly nominate someone with a “perfect record of hawkishness,” as Nick Gillespie put it.
Sanders, for his part, has been admirably vocal in his opposition to mandatory minimum sentencing, the militarization of police, and marijuana prohibition, but just this past weekend he mused about criminalizing cigarettes on Meet the Press.
Just when you think the old hippie’s got consistent principles, the major party authoritarianism kicks in.
That Tampa police were absurdly overzealous in stopping and often ticketing bike riders, with often deleterious effects on the less well-to-do, was already well known and reported on by me last year.
Tampa’s bike enforcement problem became so notorious the federal Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) got involved in studying it. The result of their research was released today.
The investigation found, among other things, that the suspected racial disparities in bike rider ticketing were real.
The report studies bike ticketing patterns from January 1, 2014 to August 30, 2015, and found that although only 40 percent of total riders were black, 73 percent of riders stopped by Tampa cops were black.
And while the Tampa Police Department claimed that rigorous stopping of bike riders was a larger crime prevention measure, the DOJ found that there was no measurable crime reduction or any kind of positive impact on public safety from the bike stops. “The bicycle stop program did, however, negatively impact community and police relations,” the press release noted.
The report did not try to claim that the racial disparities resulted from proven racial animus or discriminatory intent, however.
Fortunately, the percentage of citizens actually ticketed after being stopped is small, since it is those tickets and failure to pay them that spiral into true life-ruining situations for something that started as a very petty matter.
But the percentage of the stopped who are cited had also been disproportionately black, as the study wrote:
Even after adjusting for time and place of the stops, we still find that the percentage of Black bicyclists receiving citations exceeds that of White bicyclists. In fact, the percentage of Black and White stopped bicyclists receiving a citation is nearly identical to the unadjusted percentages— 5.3 percent of stopped Black bicyclists received citations, and 2.7 percent of matched White bicyclists received citations.
Interestingly, once Tampa PD policy changed to require documentation of bike stops after May 2015, things got a little different:
After May 2015, the TPD issued citations to 6.0 percent of stopped Black bicyclists and 6.1 percent of similarly situated stopped White bicyclists. It is unclear whether officers have changed their citation practices or have altered their documentation practices since May 2015. These findings indicate that stopped bicyclists who were Black received citations at a higher rate than stopped bicyclists who were White—even after matching on several relevant factors. Yet this difference disappeared after May 1, 2015, when the TPD changed its rules regarding the documentation of bicycle stops.
Text of the full study. It does not, alas, add to any systematized knowledge regarding what ends up happening to people receiving citations that require payment, how many go unpaid in a timely manner and what bad results arise from that, all issues the government seems unconcerned with.
Another terrible tale of enforcing bike law from Florida, involving riding the “wrong way” ending with an unarmed man shot and paralyzed.
There is so much economic despair in our country today, but if you have a good job and if you live in a good neighborhood you might not ever encounter it.
There really are “two Americas” in 2016, and they are getting farther and farther apart with each passing year. On the one hand, you have lots of people smiling in New York City these days because of the stock market boom, and property values have soared to ridiculous levels in San Francisco because of the tech bubble. But in between the two coasts there are vast stretches of forgotten people that the U.S. economy has left behind. In this article I am going to share some of their stories with you.
Because I run a website called The Economic Collapse Blog, I hear from a lot of people that are really struggling in this economy. Just yesterday, I posted an article entitled “In 1 Out Of Every 5 American Families, Nobody Has A Job“, and one of my regular readers left the following comment on that article…
After 5-6 some odd years I finally got a decent tech job that pays a couple of bucks more than typical fast food. For the first time in a long time I can say we are coming out of the black. But however, it’s a shaky recovery. If I lose this job at anytime in the next few years it will be devastating so I’m taking the opportunity to win back my certs so that I can get a higher paying tech job.
Here’s to keeping fingers crossed…
In many areas of the nation today, it is a real challenge to find a good job. According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year at this point, and you can’t support a middle class family on $30,000 a year. The American Dream feels like it has ended for millions upon millions of families, and this is leading to a lot of depression and despair.
I would like to share with you three comments that were recently left on a New York Times article about depression. In all three instances, the commenters link their battle with depression with the economy in some way…
#1But for me, I see another change that has affected me as I have entered the high risk age group. Over the years, as the economy dumps, as the businesses that have employed people in my region have cut staff, or just gone away, I have seen almost every friend that I have made in the last 30 years move away. My social network imploded.
For those who cannot easily recreate new sets of friendships, especially if they are un- or underemployed, and have fractured family relationships, there is little social support to help stave off depression. And for more and more people who are working, the push to work independently, not in an office atmosphere, creates even more isolation.
#2I have been diagnosed and have been taking meds and in therapy for 30 years. And I was hanging in there until I lost everything. College educated, a professional for 30 years, I am now on Disability and Obamacare, both of which are on the chopping block. I watch the election process in terror and wonder what will happen to people like me. Medically I am bipolar, but now I am indigent, and if I can’t access health care or a place to live, I’m done. All the Prozac in the world won’t change that.
#3I became disabled ten years ago in my mid-forties. I live alone and have no family and no friends. I miss my career so much, and having a social life. Being disabled means having less money than ever, but with greater medical costs that ever. I think of suicide quite a bit. I’m so lonely and poor. Then I got cancer a few years ago which is in remission but causing other health problem. I’m doing my best to continue to afford to keep my dog. She’s only 4 and could live another 14 years. I’m giving her the best life possible and I don’t want to leave her. She keeps me going and is the only love I have in my life. I wish there were more social service in the U.S. for people like me. If I ever “get better”, or win the lottery, I will be a fierce advocate to improve the quality of life for people like me who have fallen through the cracks. I’m living a life that is hell on earth. I can see why some people in similar situations choose to “opt out” when every day is painful and lonely.
Those that insist that “everything is going to be just fine” are ignoring millions of stories such as these.
There are so many Americans that are going through enormous suffering in quiet solitude, and because they aren’t marching in the streets they are forgotten about by the rest of us.
But of course not everyone suffers so quietly. Sometimes desperate people do desperate things, and all over the nation we are seeing rates of violent crime start to rise.
And not every person that commits acts of violent crime is looking to hurt people. Sometimes all they want is some food. The following comes from Natural News…
According to a heartbreaking report by All Self Sustained, an elderly man was threatened with a knife last month by a man and a woman in a home invasion – the pair were looking to steal food.
71-year-old Luis Rosales answered the door of his New Jersey apartment in the afternoon and was confronted by a man and woman who were armed with an eight-inch kitchen knife. The pair forced themselves inside, threatening Rosales with death if he made too much noise.
The suspects used pepper spray to affect Rosales’ vision before ransacking his apartment and raiding his fridge, telling Rosales that they were hungry. They also took his wallet.
We are witnessing the slow-motion meltdown of society.
Even with the “recovery” we have supposedly experienced, 47 percent of all Americans could not even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something.
And things are not going to be getting any better for the economy moving forward. The despair and desperation that we have seen so far are nothing compared to what is coming.
A tremendous amount of love and compassion is going to be required in the years ahead, because huge numbers of people are going to be really hurting.
So how will you respond when people all around you are in very deep trouble?
Will you “bunker up”, or will you be willing to reach out and help those less fortunate than yourself?
Almost two weeks ago, On April 14, we reported the striking news that DB has decided to “turn” against the precious metals manipulation cartel by first settling long-running silver and gold price fixing lawsuits which in addition to “valuable monetary consideration” would expose the other banks’ rigging after DB also “agreed to provide cooperation to plaintiffs, including the production of instant messages, and other electronic communications, as part of the settlement.”
It was then that we also reminded readers that the US commodity “regulator”, the CFTC in 2013 closed its five year investigation concerning allegations that the biggest bullion banks manipulate silver markets and prices. It proudly reported in September 2013 that it found no evidence of wrongdoing and dropped the probe. This is what it said:
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) Division of Enforcement has closed the investigation that was publicly confirmed in September 2008 concerning silver markets. The Division of Enforcement is not recommending charges to the Commission in that investigation. For law enforcement and confidentiality reasons, the CFTC only rarely comments publicly on whether it has opened or closed any particular investigation. Nonetheless, given that this particular investigation was confirmed in September 2008, the CFTC deemed it appropriate to inform the public that the investigation is no longer ongoing. Based upon the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring an enforcement action with respect to any firm or its employees related to our investigation of silver markets.
We concluded by asking whether, in light of this confirmation that the CFTC’s probe was “lacking” perhaps it was time for the so-called regulators who at the time was headed by ex-Goldmanite Gary Gensler (and assisted by “revolving door” expert and HFT lobby sellout Bart Chilton) to reopen its investigation?
Much to our surprise, we found that the CFTC not only was not planning on reopening its investigation, but that it had actually not heard about the settlement until nearly ten days later.
This is what Chris Powell, treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Committee, which has been crusading against precious metals manipulation for years, wrote:
CFTC didn’t know of Deutsche’s market-rigging settlement until asked by GATA
Since the CFTC has jurisdiction over the U.S. commodity futures markets and since the commission purported to have undertaken a five-year investigation of the silver market, closing it in September 2013 upon concluding that there was no cause for action –
— it was natural to seek comment from the commission about the Deutsche Bank news.
So on Saturday, April 16, your secretary/treasurer e-mailed the commission’s news media office as follows, providing the Internet link to the Bloomberg News report:
“Does the commission have any reaction to Deutsche Bank’s admission to manipulating the gold and silver markets, as reported by Bloomberg News this week? Is the commission responding to Deutsche Bank’s admission in any way? As you may recall, some years ago the commission reported that it had investigated the silver market and had found nothing improper. Is the commission reconsidering that conclusion?”
Receiving no response, on Tuesday, April 19, your secretary/treasurer sent by facsimile machine a letter to the office of the chairman of the CFTC, Tim Massad, reading: “As I am unable to get any acknowledgement from your commission’s press office, could you answer my questions here? Does the commission have any reaction to Deutsche Bank’s admission to manipulating the gold and silver markets, as reported by various news organizations last week? Is the commission responding to Deutsche Bank’s admission in any way? As you may recall, some years ago the commission reported that it had investigated the silver market and had found nothing improper. Is the commission reconsidering that conclusion? Thanks for your help.”
Having received no acknowledgment of that letter as well, yesterday – Friday, April 22 – your secretary/treasurer telephoned the CFTC’s press office and within a half hour of leaving a message received a cordial call back from an assistant to the director. He said he was unaware of the Deutsche Bank story and could find no reference to it in the commission’s compendium of news reports of interest to the commission’s work.
Your secretary/treasurer conceded that the story is being largely suppressed by Western financial news organizations and sent him the links to the Reuters and Bloomberg stories as well as a link to the original complaint in the class-action lawsuit. He said he would consult his superiors and hoped to reply to me next week.
Of course all this gives the impression that the CFTC not only doesn’t know what’s going on in its jurisdiction but also that it doesn’t want to know. It is additional evidence that certain commodity market rigging is outside the commission’s concern because the U.S. government and other governments are the actual perpetrators, surreptitious market rigging by the government being specifically authorized by the Gold Exchange Act of 1934 as amended in the 1970s –
— and because of the admission in recent official filings by CME Group, operator of the major U.S. futures exchanges, that it provides volume trading discounts to governments and central banks for surreptitiously trading all futures contracts on its exchanges:
All this also seems to confirm that the prerequisites of this market rigging are the cowardice of the monetary metals mining industry, which refuses to protest it, and the cowardice of mainstream financial news organizations, which refuse to report it.
For the past few months, we have been shown the massive crowds of millennials flooding Bernie Sanders rallies, and the dyed in the wool democrats who have been flocking to Hillary's. The narrative has been that the Democrats have really generated some enthusiasm this year that hasn't been seen in the past. We hear that Bernie is motivating a significant portion of the youth to put down the controller and get involved, while Hillary has provided a solid home for the more traditional democrats to go to.
As is often the case, however, propaganda is much different than reality. Despite what the media may portray, the fact is that democratic voter turnout is actually down significantly from 2008 (i.e. the last time a presidential race didn't include an incumbent). As Breitbart reports, millions of voters are sitting this election out that were involved in '08. Voter turnout for the Democrats this year has declined by a staggering 4.5 million voters, or 19%, compared to when Barack Obama was first taking the country by storm.
Back in 2008, as Obama battled Clinton, a whopping 23,715,866 people voted in primaries and caucuses nationwide in the states that have already voted this cycle. Fast forward to the next time there’s a Democratic primary for president, this year (since Obama was the incumbent president seeking reelection the primaries in 2012 were largely perfunctory), and turnout has dropped off significantly. Just 19,155,825 people have voted thus far in primaries and caucuses this cycle, a decrease of 4,560,041 voters or 19.23 percent.
The steep drop off is so significant on the Democratic side that the vast majority of states saw drops in voter participation in Democratic primaries and caucuses. The following contests saw less voters participate on the Democratic side in the primaries and caucuses than 2008’s contests: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Utah, Wisconsin, Vermont, American Samoa, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington state, and Wyoming.
Only a handful of states have seen increases in participation on the Democratic side, including Arizona, Michigan, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Maine. With the exception of Arizona, Sanders won—and Clinton lost—each of those contests. That means the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has only increased Democratic primary votes in one of the states she won this cycle as compared with 2008’s primary turnout. Every other state she has won this year has seen less turnout from last go-around.
The state by state comparison shows the drastic reduction in turnout.
This news may actually bode well for a potential Donald Trump candidacy, as he does seem to be able to pull people into the process that have sat out in the past. If Hillary can't do it in her own primary, there's a good chance she won't be able to do it if running against Trump in the fall.
First it was the blow up of hedge fund darling Valeant that crushed countless funds who were long the name.
Then, one month ago after the collapse of the Allergan-Pfizer deal, we showed (one of the reasons) why the hedge fund world continued to underperform the broader market: Allergan was one of the most widely held hedge fund stocks.
And now, following the biggest Apple debacle in years, here is the reason why the hedge fund community is about to see even more redemption requests and underperform the market even more: according to the latest GS hedge fund tracker, at least 163 hedge fund are long the name which has just lost over $40 billion in market cap in the after hours. The good news: it used to be over 200 as recently as a year ago.
Tears won’t be confined to Wall Street however: let’s not forget that none other than the Swiss National Bank is also long some 10.4 million shares of AAPL.
For as long as most gold and silver investors can remember, the paper markets – that is, banks and speculators placing bets with futures contracts – have set the price of those metals. And within the paper markets, “the commercials” – fabricators and big banks – have consistently fooled speculators like hedge funds into going long or short at exactly the wrong time.
The data series that tracks this relationship is known as the commitment of traders report (COT), and it’s been a pretty reliable indicator of precious metals’ short-term trajectory.
Right now that’s bad news for gold and especially for silver, because the speculators – who, remember, are usually wrong at the extremes – are exuberantly long the latter, implying that the silver recovery is due for a correction. Here’s a recent piece from well-known metals trader Dan Norcini:
By that I mean, it just keeps getting scarier and scarier.
My guess is that every speculator on the planet is long silver/short gold or outright long silver.
That of course is an exaggeration but I am not exaggerating when I categorically state that the silver market is a train wreck just waiting to happen. As I have said before, and will say so again – I would rather miss any more upside in this market than get long now, not with a trade so lopsidedly jammed with speculators on the long side. I will leave that for the daredevils and others who like driving the stagecoach as close to the edge of the mountain pass road as they possibly can.
Here is a look at the hedge fund outrights:
Yet another all time record high! Tell me we do not have a buying frenzy taking place in the silver market! I suppose it can keep going higher and the specs can keep piling on more and more longs but when it breaks, it is going to be ugly – unless you are short and then it will be a thing of beauty to behold a mass exodus of hapless specs who ended up buying the top in this thing.
Commercial interests and Swap Dealers have been more than happy to offload silver into the hands of speculators at these prices. If I were long this market, and I am not, I would get some downside protection through the use of options at the very least.
On the other side of this argument is London metals trader Andrew Maguire, who in his latest interview on King World News asserts that gold and silver are entering new, post-paper age in which physical demand sets prices:
Western central planners have finally lost control of the gold market.
There is an unprecedented liquidity drain out of London markets into physical markets in the East. It’s flowing out of the paper market into the physical exchanges. These events are unprecedented, forcing changes in the behavior of paper markets that are not comprehended by paper-centric analysts who are puzzling over outdated chart patterns and synthetically extracted data.
Just this week things came to a head. An overwhelming number of bearish observations appeared in the blogosphere. I see a lot of hand wringing about open interest structure which historically at these levels has resulted in a major rinse lower. But the gold market is increasingly driven by global physical benchmarks. The physical market dog is starting to wag the paper market tail. Anyone trading paper-centric historical patters is driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror.
Maguire goes on to say that if this is indeed the long-awaited physical take-over of the precious metals markets silver will not only fail to correct, it will go up faster than gold, bringing the gold/silver ratio down to more historically normal levels.
For those getting back into precious metals after the brutal bear market of the past few years, the prospect of the Eastern physical markets taking over from the Western paper markets is welcome. But it adds another layer of complexity to an already opaque market.
So here again, the only rational response is to embrace the short-term uncertainty and dollar-cost average. Since both camps in the above debate see precious metals much higher a few years hence, just buy a little at a time and don’t try to play the squiggles. Leave that to the pros.