- Recovery? Italy's Poor Population Has Tripled In Last Decade
Is it any wonder the Italians are revolting against the European Union?
Italians living below the level of absolute poverty almost tripled over the last decade as the country went through a double-dip, record-long recession. As Bloomberg reports, the absolute poor, or those unable to purchase a basket of necessary goods and services, reached 4.7 million last year, up from almost 1.7 million in 2006, national statistics agency Istat said Thursday. That is 7.9 percent of the population, with many of them concentrated in the nation’s southern regions.
For decades, Italy has grappled with a low fertility rate — just 1.35 children per woman compared with a 1.58 average across the 28-nation European union as of 2015, the last year for which comparable data are available.
“The poverty report shows how it is pointless to wonder why there are fewer newborn in Italy,” said Gigi De Palo, head of Italy’s Forum of Family Associations.
“Making a child means becoming poor, it seems like in Italy children are not seen as a common good.”
The number of absolute poor rose last year in the younger-age classes, reaching 10 percent in the group of those between 18 and 34 years old. It fell among seniors to 3.8 percent in the age group of 65 and older, the Istat report also showed.
Just a good job the government spent the equivalent of its entire defense budget bailing-out the bankers…
- Fusion: Will Humanity Ever Harness Star Power?
Fusion is the epitome of “high risk, high reward” scientific research.
If we were to ever successfully harness the forces that power the stars, mankind could have access to power that is almost literally too cheap to meter. However, as Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley notes, reaching that goal will be a very expensive, long-term commitment – and it’s also very possible that we may never achieve a commercially viable method of fusion power generation.
Today’s video, by the talented team at Kurzgesagt, explains how fusion works, what experiments are ongoing, and the pros and cons of pursuing fusion power generation.
HOW FUSION WORKS
Fusion involves heating nuclei of atoms – usually isotopes of hydrogen – to temperatures in the millions of degrees. At extreme temperatures, atoms are stripped of their electrons and nuclei move so quickly that they overcome their “mutual repulsion”, joining together to form a heavier nucleus. This process gives off massive amounts of energy that investors and researchers hope will propel mankind into an era of cheap and abundant electricity, but without the downsides of many other forms of energy.
I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.
– Stephen Hawking, award-winning theoretical physicist
Stars are so large that fusion occurs naturally in their cores – but here on Earth, we’re trying a number of complex methods in the hopes of replicating that process to achieve positive net energy.
The Cost of Bottling a Star
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), an experimental reactor currently being built in the south of France, will house the world’s largest ever tokamak – a doughnut-shaped reactor that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma. Construction of the facility began in 2013 and is expected to cost €20 billion upon completion in 2021.
Research organizations see ITER as a crucial step in realizing fusion. Though the facility is not designed to generate electricity, it would pave the way for functional reactors.
Competition is Heating Up
There are some who claim that the bureaucracy of government-funded labs is hampering the process. As a result, there is a pack of private companies, fueled by high-profile investors, looking to make commercially-viable fusion into a reality.
Tri Alpha, a company in southern California, is hoping their method of spinning magnetized plasma inside a containment vessel will be a lower-cost method of power generation than ITER. In 2015, they held super-heated hydrogen plasma in a stable state for 5 milliseconds, which is a huge deal in the world of fusion research. The company has attracted over $500 million in investment in the past 20 years, and has the backing of Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.
Helion Energy, located in Redmond, Washington, believes they are only a few years away from creating nuclear fusion that can be used as a source for electricity. Their reaction is created by colliding two plasma balls made of hydrogen atom cores at one million miles per hour. Helion Energy’s ongoing research is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, which the Trump administration slated for elimination. Thankfully, Helion still counts Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and Y Combinator as supporters.
General Fusion, located in Burnaby, B.C., is taking a different approach. Their piston-based reactor is designed to create energy bursts lasting thousandths of seconds, rather than a sustained plasma reaction. Heat recovered bursts would be used to generate electricity much like nuclear power plants, minus the long-term radioactive waste. General Fusion has attracted millions of dollars in funding, including investment from Bezos Expeditions and the Business Development Bank of Canada.
Time Horizon
Though commercially viable fusion is still a long way off, each new technological breakthrough brings us one step closer. With such a massive payoff for success, research will likely only increase as we get closer to bottling a star here on Earth.
- Bank Of Italy Warns Citizens Against "Creating Your Own Currency"
Authored by Louis Cammarosano via Smaulgld.com,
Citizens Claim Right to Create Scriptural Euros.
Citizens conjure Euros out of thin air, just like banks.
Create Your Own Currency!
Because the top cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum are open source, any one can create their own cryptocurrencies.
While the proliferation of cryptocurrencies has central banks concerened, another more insidious and perhaps greater threat to central banks’ monopoly on money creation is the issuance of scriptural euros by citizens.
What are Scriptural Euros?
Scriptural Euros are Euros issued by citizens under a “theory of the autonomous creation of scriptural currency” based on the idea of collective property of money that affirms the right of every citizen to autonomously create “scriptural” money (Euros) via their own accounting records. The theory of autonomous creation of scriptural currency holds that just as banks can conjure debt based money out of thin air, so can citizens.
Money thus created by citizens can then be used to extinguish their own debts.
Apparently, citizen-created euros have been accepted as payment. @marcosabait (Marco Saba) shared his experience on twitter whereby his scriptural Euros were accepted by Facebook as payment for advertising. This correspondence between @marcosabait and Facebook shows how @marcosabait created 25 Euros as payment to Facebook and Facebook accepted the citizen issued Euros as payment.
In the correspondence, @marcosabait informs Facebook Italy (in English) that banks AND citizens can create new Euro in electronic form and that he had just done so in the amount of 25 Euros and was submitting it as payment. He also referred Facebook to his Facebook page for more information on citizen created scriptural Euros.
Facebook responded in Italian by accepting @marcosabait payment of his self-created scriptural Euro, while noting his payment was being accepted this time, but such payments may not be honored in the future.
According to @marcosabait, Italian citizens have created more than 1 billion scriptural Euros since October 2016.
Starting October 2016 Italian citizens have created more than 1 billion scriptural Euro – all registered in the European Monetary Cadastre.
— Marco Saba (@marcosabait) July 16, 2017
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Internet Urban Legend?
Citizens conjuring money out of thin air and having that money accepted as payment all seems like internet urban legend. Perhaps, in the example above, the Facebook employee didn’t want to argue over 25 Euro and was just humoring @marcosabait. Or maybe, the correspondence itself was spurious. Certainly, the claim that more than 1 billion scriptural Euro have been created seems far fetched and that any large sum of scriptural Euros being accepted as payment seemed even further afield.
However…
The Bank of Italy Responds
Despite what might appear to be a ludicrous ploy to convince citizens they have the right to create their own Euros, the Bank of Italy is taking scriptual Euros seriously. Last month, the Bank of Italy issued a warning about the creation of scriptual Euros. Attached to the warning was a PDF that explained the Bank of Italy’s position on scriptual Euros.
The position paper is entitled “Scriptural Money Created by Citizens”. The paper notes that its purpose is to avoid “dangerous misunderstandings” involving scriptural Euros. The paper claims that only the Bank of Italy can issue the form of legal currency based on international and national legislation and that it is necessary for the Bank of Italy to have this power in order to guarantee overall confidence in currency and the stability of its value over time. The paper further notes that payment services through scriptwriting is an activity allowed by law only to authorized persons, such as banks, electronic money institutions and other payment institutions.
The paper concludes that “initiatives for the creation of a autonomous scriptural currency have no legal basis” and calls on citizens not to use such forms of currency.
The scriptural Euro issue may have more people asking questions about the creation of money out of thin air – if banks can do it, why can’t we?
- 3/4 UK Graduates Will Never Repay Student Loans
With tuition costs rising more than twice as quickly as consumer prices, a generation of recent college graduates are struggling to strike out on their own, burdened by a $1.4 trillion pile of debt that ineligible to be erased by the tonic of bankruptcy protection. Tuition costs have been blamed for nearly all of the ills facing the millennial generation. The rate at which re cent graduates are moving back homme with mom and dad has never been higher, with nearly a third retreating back to the basement as they struggle to jobs with adequate pay. Household format ion rate have plummeted as women put of childbirth. Meanwhile, those who have made it out are clustering in popular urba like NYC, San Francisco or DC where they’re spending more than 50% of their income on rent.
There’s no question that US graduates have it rough, but a recent study by the UK-based Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that students in the UK are facing obstacles that’re even more overwhelming than their peers in the US. As the Financial Times reported earlier this month, Three-quarters of UK university leavers will never pay off their student loans, even if they are still contributing in their 50s.
This means the UK government will have to write off some or all of the debt taken out by 77% of students because they will not earn enough to repay their loans within 30 years of graduating, according to the study, which was written up in the Financial Times.
The study amounts to more unwelcome news for the UK college students, who will soon contend with an interest-rate increase of more than a third, to an annualized 6.1%, slated for September. That increase, experts say, is a byproduct of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union – a decision that resulted in a more than 10% drop in the British pound’s value relative to the dollar and euro, according to the Guardian.
“Graduates in England were saddled with the highest student debt in the developed world, the IFS said, adding that the benefits of earlier reforms to the tuition fee system — which took pressure off the lowest-earning students — had been wiped out by subsequent changes such as the replacement of maintenance grants with loans.
The IFS said that because graduates repaid their student loans at 9 per cent of their earnings, above a certain threshold, and over a 30-year period, in many cases interest accrued on their debt too fast for repayments to keep up.
One key finding is that because interest rates on student debt are very high — up to 3 per cent above RPI — the average student accrues £5,800 of interest while studying, meaning they borrow £45,000 but have a debt of £50,800 on the day of graduation.
By contrast, the average debt burden on students in the US is far lower at $36,000 (£27,900), even though the cost of tuition varies far more at US institutions.”
Financial researher researcher Martin Lewis, who runs his own personal-finance website moneysavingexpert.com, says he has been “swamped” by UK graduates terrified by new statements that show their debt spiraling in size after interest is added later this year, he told the Guardian.
“Many graduates are starting to panic. First they look in shock at their student loan statements after noticing interest totalling thousands has been added. Then they read the headline interest rate for the 2017-18 academic year will increase from 4.6% to 6.1%. It’s no surprise I’ve been swamped with people asking if they should be trying to overpay the loans to reduce the interest.”
Counterintuitively, Lewis warns these graduates that there’s little benefit in paying off their loans early thanks to a government program that will pay off the remaining balance after 30 years. Only if the student lands a job earning £40,000 a year on graduation, and then enjoys big pay rises after, should they consider repaying their loan early, says Lewis. Here’s why:
A graduate earning £36,000 a year will repay £40,500 of a £55,000 total student loan over 30 years, said Lewis, at the current repayment rates. The remaining debt will be wiped clean after 30 years. If the same graduate cuts the total £55,000 balance to £45,000 with an overpayment of £10,000, they will still have to repay the same amount of student loan over 30 years, making the overpayment entirely pointless.
Just like in the US, student-loan debt in the UK has been soaring. Its total value rose above £100 billion ($131 billion) for the first time earlier this year, according to figures released by the Student Loans Company.
Lewis says students might as well “rip up their loan statements” and just accept the fact that they will be paying a tax equivalent to 9% of their income above £21,000, thanks to a UK government program ostensibly meant to assuage the student-loan hysteria by spreading around the cost of debt repayments.
"'For most university leavers, the student loan’ is a misnomer – it should be renamed the more accurate term: a ‘graduate contribution’ system. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap or fair, simply that people would make better financial decisions if they focus on the fact they’ll have to pay the equivalent of 9% extra tax above £21,000 for 30 years,' Lewis said.”
As the FT notes, the 2012 reforms, carried out by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, tripled tuition fees to £9,000 and increased average university funding by a quarter. But the majority of the cost rises were borne by richer graduates, resulting in the lowest-earning third of graduates benefiting by an average of £1,500.
Recent reforms have eroded this advantage: cutting maintenance grants has reduced the government deficit but meant students from low-income families are graduating with the highest debt levels, often over £57,000.
Laura van der Erve, one of the report’s authors, said told the FT that universities are “undoubtedly” better off under the current system than they were before the 2012 reforms. But she warned that the changes had shifted incentives towards institutions offering low-cost arts and humanities courses, which now attract 47 per cent more income per student than they did in 2011. By contrast, the highest-cost subjects only attract 6 per cent_more income. “This does not sit comfortably with the government’s intention to promote typically high-cost [science, technology, engineering and maths] subjects,” she said.
Intensifying student-debt burdens have been blamed for helping Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn won support from a swath of young voters on the back of his election promise to abolish £9,250 annual tuition fees altogether.
One Conservative heavyweight noted the most pressing issue related to college costs: The question of whether these costly educations represent an adequate value for students. One study in the US revealed that graduates at large state flagship universities are often leaving college with worse cognitive skills than they had upon enrolling.
“Damian Green, the Conservatives’ first secretary of state, told the FT earlier this month that the debt burden on young people was “clearly a huge issue” and something his party would have to address. “I think in the long term we’ve got to show that [students] are getting value for the money,” he said.
Even liberal politicians criticized the government’s plan to focus student debt reforms on percentages and interest rates.
“Responding to the research Sarah Stevens, head of policy at the Russell Group, said that increased undergraduate fees have been “crucial” to universities at a time of cuts to government teaching grants. She suggested that in order to make higher education more affordable for students, ministers should address concerns over the interest rates applied to loans.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, agreed that issues such as interest rates, repayment thresholds and the period allowed for repayment affect graduates far more than the “sticker price” of university courses, which receive far more political attention.
‘The debate about fee levels is a bit of a red herring because what matters is what you are paying back later,’ he said. ‘The point at which you feel it in your pocket is when you’re in your 30s, with a mortgage and childcare costs, and 9 per cent of your salary above a certain threshold is going to pay back your student loan.’”
Judging by the IFS report, and other the recent warnings about the metastasizing consumer-debt crisis issued by the BOE, most contemporary students and recent graduates will be feeling this burden until they’re just about ready to retire. Let’s hope, for their sakes, that they can find some way to afford it.
- How "Nothing To Hide" Leads To "Nowhere To Hide" – Why Privacy Matters In An Age Of Tech Totalitarianism
Would you allow a government official into your bedroom on your honeymoon? Or let your mother-in-law hear and record every conversation that takes place in your home or car – especially disagreements with your husband or wife? Would you let a stranger sit in on your children’s playdates so that he could better understand how to entice them with candy or a doll?
Guess what? If you bring your phone with you everywhere, or engage with a whole-house robo helper such as Alexa or Echo or Siri or Google, you’re opening up every aspect of your life to government officials, snooping (possibly criminal) hackers, and advertisers targeting you, your spouse and your children.
The following is not a screed against technology. But it is a plea to consider what we’re giving up when we hand over privacy, wholesale, to people whom we can neither see nor hear… people whose motives we cannot fathom.
The widened lanes of communication, and the conveniences that Smart Phones, wireless communities, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have fomented are indeed helpful to some extent. They allow, for example, for remote working, which allows people to spend more time with their families and less time commuting. In areas such as the energy business, the field of predictive analytics, born of Big Data and the Industrial Internet, helps mitigate the danger of sending humans to oil rigs at sea.
And on a personal level, of course, the conveniences are innumerable: Grandparents living far away can “see” their grandchildren more often than they could in years past, thanks to technology such as FaceTime and Skype.
People save money: As you walk by a restaurant, a lunch coupon suddenly appears on your phone.
And they can save time: Someday soon, the Internet of Things might tell your coffee maker and alarm clock to go off before its normal time, because bad weather is coming and your son’s school bus will arrive 15 minutes early to avoid the fog.
But there’s a corollary we must think about. (Two corollaries, actually, one being the long-term effects of Electromagnetic Fields on our health, and especially on our brains. But so far, few studies have been funded to examine this.)
We must acknowledge that we’re gaining all this convenience at the expense of our privacy.
When you ask Siri or Echo or Alexa or Google (and others of their ilk) something, it’s great to get an immediate answer… but the corollary is that Siri and Echo and Alexa and Google are listening to every conversation you’re having with your spouse, every fight you’re having with your kids, and every bit of heavy breathing that might be taking place in the dark.
That response inherently grants legitimacy to the search in the first place. The implication is that if you have nothing to “hide,” then the tech companies, the advertisers, the government, etc. should indeed have full access to every aspect of your life.
Note that the word in the phrase is “hide” and not “protect”, thereby implying that all that is not shared with any intrusive party must be something nefarious, something you’re trying to keep from those who have a right to it.
And if you think about it, “nothing” is the wrong word, too: Forgive the vulgarity here, but would you use the toilet in front of your mother-in-law? Would you allow an IRS official into your bedroom at night? Or to move into your home and record every conversation that takes place? Would you open your private diary to your spouse’s ex or to your children? Clearly, there are some things we do indeed wish to keep private.
In other words, if it’s OK to want to protect the privacy of one’s genitals or one’s private thoughts, why is it wrong to want to protect one’s conversations or whereabouts?
Totalitarianism and Tech – Caveat Emptor
Privacy is the first thing that a totalitarian state attempts to destroy.
Ask anyone who lived behind the Berlin Wall or in Stalinist Russia. If you know what parents are teaching their children, you can intervene and destroy the family, a primary goal of totalitarianism. If you know someone’s secrets or vulnerabilities, you can manipulate him. Knowledge truly is power, especially if you are a big state wanting to control people.
As a child, I was a huge fan of figure skating, and in particular of the great, then-East German champion Katarina Witt. In an interview a few years ago, she revealed her shock that the Stasi collected thousands of records of all her comings and goings and private conversations. The spies even noted when she had been intimate with her boyfriend. When the government knows all, no one is immune, and everyone can be controlled.
And just think, they were documenting Miss Witt’s activities and conversations by hand, back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now, nearly every single aspect of our lives is being recorded in real time. Every email, every text, every phone conversation. Every time you allow your phone to know where you are, your whereabouts are noted. Soon, that Internet of Things — IoT — which already connects 50 billion “things” through an internet of its own, will be coming to your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your coffeemaker. Happy Alexa and GE “smart fridge” commercials are airing as we speak.
And not only are we letting all of this happen, we’re welcoming it. Twenty years ago, it was Miss Witt’s friends who recorded her personal conversations, and strangers who spied on her. But as she has noted, these days, we give a lot of our privacy away of our own free will. If someone were parked outside your house, surveilling you day and night, it would be unnerving, no? But we’re fine keeping our phones on us 24/7, and telling Facebook personal details about ourselves.
We do this because of the convenience, which will be increasing in scope as quickly as do the various surveillance mechanisms. Will it be convenient when your fridge tells your phone that you’re running low on orange juice (as the bottle will have a sensor, too)? Perhaps.
But will it be convenient when that same fridge tells your health insurance company that you’ve got ice cream in the freezer? And when your rates go up because of it?
Worse – will it be convenient when that fridge listens to your kitchen conversations and tells the government that you’ll be organizing a political discussion group on Tuesday? Or when it tells that bizarre man you went on one date with, who hacked your system, that your daughter has a recital this Friday night?
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is an extrapolation of what happens when people who crave power gain access to vast amounts of personal information.
The more you tell Facebook, or Siri, or Google, or FourSquare, or your phone, or your washing machine, then the more of your own personal power and privacy you’re giving up. (And the more photos you post of your young children, the more of their power you’re relinquishing. So, parents — stop. Now.)
Bottom line: Once the state (or a company) knows your weaknesses, they can exploit them. They can go after you in myriad ways. And I don’t just mean to “punish” you… I mean to manipulate you.
If a politician has access to your personal proclivities, then he can easily craft, via Artificial Intelligence, a targeted campaign that caters to exactly what the data tell him you want to hear. In the future, he could even warp news stories, video and even audio in real time to appeal to you for gain.
If a potential employer is considering you for a job, then she can (already) access every YouTube video you’ve ever watched, every public post you’ve ever made, and, soon, everything else you’ve put online. In the future, she might be able to access everything you’ve ever said in your home or in your car, or every video of you taken by your television when you think it’s off.
Those conversations and images will be sold as commodities. “Data” = “money” and “power.” Companies will soon specialize in mining all that personal data; they’ll be paid to flag “inappropriate” conversations, texts or images. Think about it.
A private banker I spoke to in Asia is proud of the fact that his bank is working in concert with FinTech to develop Know Your Customer technology on steroids: It will find every single email, text message, photo, post, and even online search that you’ve ever done so that it can (and this sounds so innocuous) “paint a holistic and predictive picture of client needs.”
That predictive part is critical. Not only do data tell those who hold them where you’ve been, but AI and Big Data analysis can predict where you’re going (both physically and psychologically)… and here’s the really scary part… before you know it.
That gives the data holders real powers of manipulation. The winners of a battle are nearly always the ones with the advanced information, the ones who can launch the surprise attack.
Technology can lead to convenience, but it can also lead to abuses of power. In its extreme, that is called totalitarianism.
In the end, we must take precautions if we’re to have anything close to liberty. Some of you have, no doubt, read Jonah Goldberg’s excellent book from 2007, Liberal Fascism, the hardcover of which features a smiley face graphic with a Hitler mustache. In the introduction, Mr. Goldberg quotes a segment from a Bill Maher show in which George Carlin says, in essence, (and I’m paraphrasing) that “when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a smiley face.”
I’d go a step further — it will be cloaked in an emoji… seemingly innocuous, friendly, and ubiquitous.
We must stop giving away our privacy. We must start thinking about personal “data” as the commodity that it already is, and even as a weapon that can be used against us.
If we don’t stop and reconsider what we’re giving away, not only will there be nothing to hide, but nowhere to hide.
- "It's Raining Needles" Locals Frustrated As Opioid Addicts Litter Ground With Syringes
Drug-overdose deaths rose 19% in 2016 to 52,000, making drugs the leading killer of American adults under 50. And all evidence suggests these totals have continued to climb in 2017, propelled by the worsening opioid epidemic or the fact that more dangerous opioid analogues like fentanyl and carfentanil are findng their way into the drug supply.
Indeed, the US has a higher rate of drug related deaths than any other developed country in the world. As we’ve reported previously, the epidemic is straining public resources like hospitals, local police departments, and child services which in many states have seen a surge in cases where the parents are addicted to opioids. To that list, we can now add local public health department in areas hit hard by the epidemic, which are struggling to clean up a flood of used and possibly infected needles discarded by addicts.
“They hide in weeds along hiking trails and in playground grass. They wash into rivers and float downstream to land on beaches. They pepper baseball dugouts, sidewalks and streets. Syringes left by drug users amid the heroin crisis are turning up everywhere.
In Portland, Maine, officials have collected more than 700 needles so far this year, putting them on track to handily exceed the nearly 900 gathered in all of 2016. In March alone, San Francisco collected more than 13,000 syringes, compared with only about 2,900 the same month in 2016.”
People, often children, risk getting stuck by discarded needles, raising the prospect they could contract blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV or be exposed to remnants of heroin or other drugs. It's unclear whether anyone has gotten sick, but the reports of children finding the needles can be sickening in their own right. One 6-year-old girl in California mistook a discarded syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth; she was unharmed, according to NBC Boston.
“‘I just want more awareness that this is happening,’ said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California, while swimming. ‘You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach. But you think that it wouldn't happen to you. Sure enough.’
They are a growing problem in New Hampshire and Massachusetts — two states that have seen many overdose deaths in recent years.
‘We would certainly characterize this as a health hazard,’ said Tim Soucy, health director in Manchester, New Hampshire's largest city, which collected 570 needles in 2016, the first year it began tracking the problem. It has found 247 needles so far this year.”
Needles turn up in places like parks, baseball diamonds, trails and beaches, places where drug users can gather and attract little attention. They toss the needles out of carelessness, or the fear of being prosecuted for possessing them. One child was poked by a needle left on the grounds of a Utah elementary school. Another youngster stepped on one while playing on a beach in New Hampshire. Even if these children did't get sick, they still had to endure a battery of tests to make sure they didn't catch anything. The girl who put a syringe in her mouth was not poked but had to be tested for hepatitis B and C, her mother said.
Some community advocates have started helping out, organizing patrols to dispose of illegally discarded needles.
"Rocky Morrison leads a cleanup effort along the Merrimack River, which winds through the old milling city of Lowell, and has recovered hundreds of needles in abandoned homeless camps that dot the banks, as well as in piles of debris that collect in floating booms he recently started setting.
He has a collection of several hundred needles in a fishbowl, a prop he uses to illustrate that the problem is real and that towns must do more to combat it.
'We started seeing it last year here and there. But now, it's just raining needles everywhere we go,' said Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile (188-kilometer) river."
Still, children continue to find, and sometimes accidentally stick themselves with, the discarded needles – it’s another way in which the worsening public-health crisis that is the opioid epidemic disproportionately impacts the young. Some parents in Santa Cruz, Calif. even talk about the first time children find a needle as a rite of passage.
Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past 4 1/2 years. It says it has gotten reports of 12 people getting stuck, half of them children.
"It's become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle," said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group's needle team. "It's very depressing. It's infuriating. It's just gross."
Along the Merrimack, nearly three dozen riverfront towns are debating how to stem the flow of needles. Two regional planning commissions are drafting a request for proposals for a cleanup plan. They hope to have it ready by the end of July.
"We are all trying to get a grip on the problem," said Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini. "The stuff comes from somewhere. If we can work together to stop it at the source, I am all for it."
While the crisis’s epicenter is in Ohio and the Rust – opioid-related deaths in Ohio jumped from 296 in 2003 to 2,590 in 2015 – Northeastern states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and even Vermont and New Hampshire have been especially hard hit.
In Ohio, resources have been spread so thin that one city council member has proposed a controversial solution: When people who dial 911 seeking help for someone who's overdosing on opioids, they may start hearing something new from dispatchers: “No.” Dan Picard, a city councilman in Middletown, Ohio, population 50,000, floated the idea.
Picard and others have described his proposal as a cry of frustration.
“It’s not a proposal to solve the drug problem,” Picard said this week. “My proposal is in regard to the financial survivability of our city. If we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year and $6 million after that, we’re in trouble. We’re going to have to start laying off. We're going to have to raise taxes,” he told the Washington Post.
But as death tolls rise, and local morgues run out of room for more bodies, Picard's proposal begs the question: What, exactly is our plan for dealing with this crisis?
- Meet DiDi: China's Answer To Uber
For better or worse, just about everybody has heard of Uber. Over the last few years, the ride-haling company has grown to dominate the market in the U.S. and beyond, currently operating in over 400 cities around the globe – despite significant resistance and outright bans in some places. DiDi, on the other hand, is unlikely to be on your radar. Having bought out Uber’s operations in China last year, the company currently enjoys 95 percent market share in its home country.
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, the infographic below shows if it were to come to a game of Top Trumps, DiDi wouldn’t be such a bad card to hold.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Founded in 2012, and working on the basis of almost $16 billion worth of funding, it has amassed 38.5 million monthly users (compared to Uber’s 40), is active in around 400 cities and is valued at $50 billion.
As illustrated in the Statista report ‘The Chinese Passenger Car Market Outlook’, revenue from ride sharing in China is projected to see a CAGR of 32 percent from 2016 to 2021. Likewise, the number of users is expected to grow by 15 percent.
As Uber begins to falter and face stiffer competition from alternatives like Lyft, it might not be long before DiDi is the biggest ride hailing company in the world.
- Car-Theft Ring In The Netherlands Has Stolen Nearly A Dozen Teslas
Earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the firs production model o the Tesla Model 3, the company’s first sedan marketed toward broader cohort of working Americans who had presumably balked at the price tag of the company’s older model. Musk sees a truly “mass market” car as insurance against the types of sales declines that briefly sent the company’s shares into bear-market territory about a week and a half ago.
Musk has said he hopes to go from manufacturing 100,000 cars a year to 500,000 with the launch of the Model 3 – but one has to wonder whether or not this is actually possible. However, some unscrupulous Tesla enthusiasts have aparently decided they don’ feel like waiting around to find out.
As Jalopnik reports, there have been a rash of Tesla thefts across Europe as thieves, apparently undeterred by the controversy surrounding the company’s autopilot assisted-driving software, are trying to snatch up as many of them as possible.
It’s unusual to hear about a rash of thefts involving Tesla vehicles—they’re not Hondas after all—but a group of thieves in the Netherlands have managed to steal nearly a dozen of the luxury cars, according to Jalopnik, and no one’s sure why just yet.
As anyone who’s at least seen the first few seasons of the Sopranos will recognize the tactics of a sophisticated, multinational car-theft ring.
“Whatever’s happening, reports suggest it’s part of an intricate operation – or it’s simply being handled by thieves who know their shit. The Dutch news site nrc.nl reports that “at least eleven” Tesla vehicles have been recently stolen in the country.
Once they’re lifted, local police reportedly said that the vehicles are dismantled within a couple hours of being purloined. How they’re managing to pull it off is left to speculation, for now. The news site said the most plausible theory is the use of a relay device that can connect to the key and unlock the car door. One Tesla owner reportedly captured a man on film “lingering” around his vehicle with a laptop, before driving away with it.”
The thefts are occurring as sales of electric vehicles (which include plug-in hybrids) in Q1 of 2017 grew briskly across much of Europe: they rose by 80% Y/Y in eco-friendly Sweden, 78% in Germany, just over 40% in Belgium and grew by roughly 30% across the European Union.
However, one data point was particularly revelatory, and might speak to the thieves’ motivation for the grand-theft auto spree. Sales in Denmark cratered by over 60% as the local government phased out taxpayer subsidies for electric vehicles. More recently, Tesla stock climbed on Monday as the company miraculously fended off another PR nightmare:
On Sunday, the Kandiyohi County Sheriff’s Office in Minneapolis released a statement that said a 2016 Tesla Model S ended up flipped over on its roof after the car sped out of control while its autopilot system was engaged. The accident left all five occupants in the car with minor injuries.
However, as Jalopnik reported Monday, the driver of the vehicle at the time of the crash has withdrawn his accusation that the software was responsible for the wreck. Musk took to twitter shortly after to defend the driver, claiming the accusation was an honest mistake, but his words did little to ameliorate the 2.5% drop in the company’s shares triggered by the initial reports of the crash. Though the curious timing of his decision to recant almost makes one wonder if there was a vigorous back and forth "settlement" negotiation behind the scenes between the driver, David Clark, and Musk which prompted the former to radically change his story.
Turning back to the string of thefts, rumors circulated in international media that the company is developing software update to help deter thieves, though Tesla execs appeared unwilling to comment on the matter.
Jon McNeill, Tesla’s president of sales and service, told nrc.nl that the “method used by the thieves is also used to steal other cars,” but didn’t elaborate.
Regardless of your feelings about Tesla, we should all hope that the spike in thefts isn’t a harbinger of the economic collapse described by Musk during his speech at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island. The ultimate irony here would be if the thieves turn out to be displaced industrial workers who lost their jobs as their old factory laid off most of its human workers and switched to a “lights out” format.
- San Francisco's Dirty Little Secret
It's one of the most racially segregated cities in North America…
Via Elaine's Idle Mind blog (h/t Climateer Investing),
Good Zoning Laws Make Good Neighbors
Three years ago, FT had an article praising Tokyo’s laissez-faire zoning laws. Landowners can build and demolish as they see fit; the rules are set at the national level, so local governments have no say in the matter.
The article suggests that San Francisco could learn a thing or two from relaxed development rules. Ha. Hahahahaha. Why on earth would San Francisco residents want to liberate housing development??
In Japan, a housing development is the developer’s business. In San Francisco, it’s everyone’s business. Neighbors appeal building permits based on traffic considerations, shadow effects, environmental impact, historic preservation, and all manner of other stuff.
Here’s what they really want to preserve:
The upper blue area is North Beach and Little Italy. The red cluster to the right of that is Chinatown, port of entry for Chinese immigrants during the railroad and Gold Rush years. The red blocks on the west are the second, third, and fourth Chinatowns, formed after 1965. The orange area is the Latino Mission District; the dense blue spot down south is the Jewish retirement community. Source: Dotmap
San Francisco is culturally diverse, but the diversity is strictly segregated. We call this historical character, and character can only be maintained by keeping outsiders out. Neighborhoods can’t exactly come out and impose cultural segregation, but they can enforce zoning laws. By blocking new buildings and preventing the renovation of old ones, residents ensure that the demographic makeup stays the same year after year.
When policy initiatives aren’t enough, diversity can be preserved in other ways. In Chinatown, landlords often advertise vacancies only in Chinese newspapers and sites, ensuring that incoming residents are also Chinese. The Mission District promotes gentrification resistance movements such as the Yuppie Eradication Project and Causa Justa, which tracks the number of Latino households displaced by white residents.
In any other city, we might start slinging the r-word around. Here in San Francisco, it’s a reasonable fear of displacement. I suspect that most of what we call racism today is this same type of fear.
City residents are right to be scared: The Fillmore District used to be known as the center of West Coast jazz, the Harlem of the West, until it was targeted for redevelopment in the 1960s. Urban renewal destroyed the Fillmore’s low rent housing, forcing tens of thousands of diverse residents out of the neighborhood. The development was widely criticized as a “N…. Removal” project. Today, the Fillmore District is just another place where rich tech workers live.
The area formerly known as the Harlem of the West
San Francisco is frequently charged with NIMBYism, in which wealthy landlords are accused of blocking development to uphold property prices. While it’s easy to rip on the landed gentry, low income residents are actually some of the most vocal opponents of new development.
75 percent of San Francisco’s rental stock is under rent control, and many units are priced so far below market rates that no amount of free market development could keep these tenants in their homes. The locals don’t want to compete with newcomers for business and housing because they know they can’t.
It’s these charming pockets of xenophobia that have preserved San Francisco’s historical character and made it such a desirable place to live. If SF were to liberate its zoning regulations, it might turn into San Jose.
Don’t get me wrong; San Jose is a lovely metropolitan area — I practically live there myself. San Jose is an older city with a history that goes back to the 18th century Spanish pueblos, but its historical character has long been displaced by the urban developments that rich hipsters are now trying to shoehorn into San Francisco.
Site of California’s first pueblo-town in downtown San Jose. We have the Fairmont Hotel, a Sheraton, and the Silicon Valley Capital Club, a private club for rich people.
So we can either have a bunch of segregated areas with rich cultural history and strict zoning plans, or a culturally dispossessed Frappuccino. It’s worth noting that, despite offering lower rent and easier access to the likes of Facebook and Google, Silicon Valley tech workers would rather not live in San Jose.
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