When last I checked in on imaginary internet money, the DoJ was
launching an investigation into “possible” market manipulation in
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other iterations of what, on multiple levels,
looks like a giant global pyramid scheme (get it? “multiple levels”,
“pyramid scheme”).
While that’s all fine and good, it kind of misses the point. As I explained via a Sopranos reference, asking if there’s manipulation going on in cryptocurrencies is like asking if there’s prostitution going on at theBada Bing! .
That is, of course there’s manipulation in that market. But the larger
issue is that the whole damn thing is suspect. Going after Bitcoin
spoofers is like arresting hookers at the Bing. You’re missing the forest for the trees.
I joke a lot about the absurdity inherent in Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies and proponents of the market don’t do themselves any
favors by doing shit that reinforces stereotypes (see here and here,
for instance). But in all seriousness, there is virtually no chance
these “assets” survive in their current form. That doesn’t mean the
concept of cryptocurrencies and/or the theoretical underpinnings of the
market are going away, but it does mean that if you’re betting on, say,
Bitcoin in its current form to rally unimpeded to infinity on the way to
supplanting traditional currencies printed by developed market central
banks, you are a moron. Plain and simple. It ain’t gonna happen.
One person who agrees is Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller
(and really I don’t even know why I bother because citing mainstream
economists in an effort to convince cryptocurrency acolytes they’re
wrong is an exercise in futility by definition), who earlier this week
chatted with CNBC about what the future is likely to look like for
Bitcoin.
His overarching message was that it might well just go the way of the
dinosaurs, but he couched it in friendlier terms than that. To wit:
Bitcoin won’t look anything like it is today. It will
have a different name, if it exists. There will have been many hard
forks changing it and changing it. And, it’ll be a matter of dispute
whether it exists or not.
Yes, “a matter of dispute whether it exists or not.” Of course that
assumes it still exists in one form or another and while, as alluded to
above, it’s likely the concept isn’t going away, it’s possible that it
will, in which case there will be no “dispute” and the only people
claiming it’s still around will be the people who swear to Christ that Megalodon is still swimming around out there somewhere.
In any event, the punchline to the whole Shiller video comes when he
describes an exchange he had with a student who insisted on keeping his
laptop open during finals so he could ensure he didn’t miss an
“opportunity” to trade fucking Bitcoin....MORE, including video.
In addition to publishing "Irrational Exuberance" in March, 2000 with
the NASDAQ hitting its all time closing high of 5048 (subsequent low
1114, how's a 78% decline grab ya?) he is the keeper of the Cowles
Commission records.* From one of our Forecasting Equity Returns posts:
A subject near and dear to my heart. I may be the only
person I've ever met who read every page of "The Cowles Commission's
Common Stock Indexes 1871-1937".
[you must be a blast at parties -ed]
Over the years Professor Shiller has also picked up some tchotchkes, including an Econ. Nobel.
The Cowles connection probably has more utility and a few other folks have thought so as well.
In addition to Shiller several other Cowles associates have won Nobel prizes for research done while at the Cowles
Commission.
These include Tjalling Koopmans,
Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu,
James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon,
Lawrence Klein, Trygve Haavelmo and Harry Markowitz". -Marginal Revolution
China is turning sci-fi policing films into reality.
In the 2011 CBS show Person of Interest, reclusive computer scientist Harold Finch builds an artificial intelligence
system called “the Machine” that compiles and analyzes troves of data
to predict murders. Finch and his henchman, John, then chase down the
perpetrator and prevent the crime. Public security officials in the
Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang, it turns out, are turning that
fiction into fact.
An enormous data-driven program that pulls from
health records, financials, vehicle checkpoints and police reports to
identify individuals likely to commit crimes in China’s politically
sensitive northwest region has just been revealed. Launched in 2016, the
“big data” policing initiative in Xinjiang is one of many law
enforcement initiatives the country is launching, drawing on its growing
capabilities in the fields of AI and robotics.
At Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Taser-wielding robots patrol crowds of
tourists. While the robots negotiate their own path along designated
routes, the Tasers are activated by an officer controlling the bot
remotely. In Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s central Henan Province,
similar police robots that look like armless Daleks roam the high-speed
train station. They use facial-recognition software to help officers
identify suspects, interact with customers and answer their questions.
Police officers at the station wear facial-recognition sunglasses,
developed by Beijing-based tech company LLVision, which pick out fake
IDs and identify wanted criminals. And in the central metropolis of
Wuhan, the Ministry of Public Security has teamed up with tech giant
Tencent to develop a fully automated police station driven by the
latter’s AI technology.
A drone operated by the traffic police patrols a highway in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province, during the three-day May Day holiday in 2016
These technologies, which could help fix
weaknesses in China’s public security infrastructure, have also sparked
concerns of misuse. But they highlight key factors helping China pull
ahead in the use of AI in policing. The country, which recently declared
its goal of emerging as a global leader in AI
and robotics, is channeling heavy investments in these fields. And as a
single-party state, it can marry that technology with policing while
facing fewer questions than its democratic counterparts.
“While a number of countries, including the U.S., boast the
technological capabilities China is integrating into law enforcement,
political considerations make it difficult for these countries to follow
suit,” says Kam C. Wong, a former Hong Kong police officer and
professor emeritus at Xavier University. The use of AI in policing does
happen in the U.S., but it usually requires extenuating circumstances,
he says....MUCH MORE
Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] is talking with Alphabet Inc’s
autonomous driving unit Waymo about using its technology on Uber’s
ride-hailing app, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on
Wednesday, signaling a possible thaw in relations between the firms.
Khosrowshahi said on stage at the Code Conference that Uber’s
relationship with Waymo was “getting better” since Uber in February
agreed to pay Waymo $245 million in shares to settle a legal dispute
over trade secrets.
“We’re having discussions with Waymo. If something happens, great. If not, we can live with that, too,” Khosrowshahi said....MORE
"Soars" might be a bit much but the stock is up 10.8% on a generally down day.
$41.92+4.09, last.
From ZeroHedge:
Step aside Tesla and Uber: there is a new-selfdriving cool kid in town.
On Thursday morning, tech-investing giant SoftBank Vision Fund, which
over the past year has been spending money like the Swiss National Bank
buying US stocks on tilt, announced it would will invest $2.25 billion in General Motors Co.’s driverless-car unit valuing it at $11.5 billion,
creating a new start in the ongoing fierce battle by tech companies and
startups to become the first to commercialize autonomous vehicles.
SoftBank Vision Fund will take a 19.6% stake in GM Cruise Holding
GM said that the fund, an affiliate of Japan’s SoftBank Group, will
take a 19.6% stake in GM Cruise Holdings LLC, a newly formed entity
primarily made up of Cruise Automation, the driverless-car developer
that GM acquired in early 2016 for around $1 billion.
The Vision Fund’s investment will be staggered, coming in two
tranches: an initial $900 million payment, and another of $1.35 billion
once Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial deployment.
The deal will provide not only a major financial backer - a la what
Uber tried to do with Warren Buffett and failed - but will also "afford
GM increased flexibility with respect to capital allocation" as it plows
more money into developing a network of autonomous ride-share vehicles,
targeted for sometime next year, GM said....MORE
Starting to talk real money.
From Reuters, May 28:
Ant Financial Services Group, operator of China’s biggest online payment
platform by market share, Alipay, has closed its latest funding round
having raised $10 billion from a clutch of global and local investors,
five people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Ant’s first fundraising targeting global money values the firm at
$150 billion, the people said, compared with about $60 billion after its
previous fundraising in April 2016.
A number of global
sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms joined the fundraising
as main investors. They include Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC Pte Ltd
[GIC.UL] and state investor Temasek Holdings (Private) Ltd [TEM.UL], as
well as U.S. private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC [WP.UL], the people
said.
Malaysian sovereign fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd [KHAZA.UL] has also joined as a major investor, one of the people said.
The
funding round also brought in private equity firm Carlyle Group LP and
venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which typically invests in
early-stage start-ups, three of the people said.
The amount and investor line-up are finalised and the transfer of funds is underway, the people said....MORE
This morning I attended a most interesting conference on artificial intelligence at the Penn Club in midtown Manhattan. The meeting featured startups, as well as chip-equipment giant Applied Materials (AMAT), and it was hosted by Pierre Ferragu, who recently left his post as tech analyst at Bernstein, to take up a new role covering many areas of tech at New Street Partners, a research-only firm with no brokerage business. (My profile of Ferragu was published in April.)
The focus was very much on what kinds of chips will be used for “accelerating” articulated intelligence approaches such as “deep learning.”
And it was a good survey of the varying opinions of how dominant Intel (INTC), Nvidia (NVDA), and Xilinx (XLNX) will be in the future of computing.
The
speakers generally agreed that silicon for AI of one sort or another
will be a $15 billion market annually sometime in the next five years,
and that number, they agreed, may turn out to be too conservative. The
question is what kinds of chips will those be?
The most extreme view was offered by Niel Viljoen, who is founder and chief executive of one startup, Netronome, which is making a network-acceleration chip.
Viljoen’s
view is that Intel’s microprocessors will be more and more a minority
of computing as new kinds of chips take over. “The CPU will be less
involved with every bite,” said Viljoen.
“The
architectures” of chips, he said, “will be about fabrics and the
accelerators, and something we didn't touch on, memory, how it is
organized and how that distribution happens” for memory chips such as
DRAM.
Although Nvidia’s prominence is recognized in AI, with its
GPUs, the speakers were pointing to a future in which many kinds of
chips will be used, including very novel types that focus more heavily
on memory circuitry rather than just compute circuitry. That view was
reinforced by another startup, Mipsology, which is making software to
better use “field-programmable gate arrays,” the programmable chips sold
by Intel and Xilinx and Lattice Semiconductor (LSCC).
Mipsology’s CEO, Ludovic Larzul, explained that some
tasks in deep learning require traditional “branching” instructions,
computer commands that follow a more narrow “if/then/else” structure,
which doesn’t sit well with GPUs.
Another startup presented the case for an entirely different kind of chip for AI. Syntiant, which just came out of “stealth mode” a couple weeks ago, and most of whose executives came from Broadcom (AVGO), is making a chip that is focused on memory, and that uses analog chip expertise more than digital-semiconductor approaches, more akin to what one finds in companies such as Analog Devices (ADI).
As CEO Kurt Busch
described the company's chips, “We are doing the computation in memory
[…] We are 100% eliminating that memory bandwidth bottleneck” in
conventional memory chips.
Syntiant focuses on using those memory chips for “edge”
devices, things like cars and smartwatches and other things with tight
power constraints and that can't always connect to cloud data centers
for machine learning.
Busch’s example of edge AI was traffic
cameras. “There are traffic cameras on every corner, and they are taking
all the license plates they see and sending those images to the cloud,”
he said. “Why not instead have the cloud tell the cameras we are
looking for this particular license plate, and just have the cameras
that see that license plate send their images to the cloud....MUCH MORE
I'm sure a lot of folks have this, The Verge was the first we saw with the recode piece somehow stuck in one of the feedreaders.
From The Verge:
Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley internet analyst and now partner at
venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, delivered
her annual internet trends report at this year’s Code conference in California today (May 30). Here are her slides:
—insert 224 slides here—
Some highlights:
Global smartphone shipment growth has fallen to effectively nil.
Growth in the world’s number of internet users has also slowed to about 7% in 2016, down from 12% in 2016.
Roughly 50% of the world, about 3.6 billion people, now have some access to the internet.
The average adult spends about 6 hours per day with a digital device.
Wifi is everywhere: There are around 450 million wifi networks in the world, up from about 100 million five years ago.
There are three messaging apps—WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat—that each have more than 1 billion monthly active users....
2017 was the first year in which smartphone unit
shipments didn’t grow at all. As more of the world become smartphone
owners, growth has been harder and harder to come by. The same goes for
internet user growth, which rose 7 percent in 2017, down from 12 percent
the year before. With more than half the world online, there are fewer
people left to connect.
I've been meaning to tell some of the story of the "S" boys: Summers, Steyer and Shleifer, in serial form but here Mr. Warsh sketches an overview that I couldn't match.
No one who was investing in Russia during that time-period has clean hands, no one, including Mr. Browder who hit the newswires earlier today.
...Who is EP’s proprietor?
David Warsh covered economics for The Boston Globe 22 years and, earlier, reported on business for The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and from Saigon for Pacific Stars and Stripes and Newsweek .
He is a graduate of Harvard College in Social Studies and a two-time
winner of financial journalism’s Loeb Award. In 2004 he was the J.P.
Morgan Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. What does EP cover?
EP reports mainly on university economics, as it affects historical
awareness, political debate and public policy. It seeks to put
under-noticed economic journalism in touch with a wider audience. EP is
not about the business cycle. Who reads it?
Economists, lawyers, journalists, managers, policy-makers, educators,
lobbyists, investors, citizens — anyone interested in the connections
between university economics and the rest of the world....
And from Economic Principals, May 20:
It may seem like an odd time to bring up the other Russia
story, this being the first anniversary of Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s probe. But as it happens, there has been a break in this
neglected case – or, rather, two of them.
It was slightly more than a year ago that President Trump fired FBI director James Comey and, the next day, told Russian officials
visiting the Oval Office that Comey was “crazy, a real nut job.” He
continued, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken
off.” Two weeks later Mueller was appointed, and his Russia
investigation has only escalated since then, sprawling into several
unexpected corners.
The New York Times offered readers a helpful graphic
last winter: “Most of the stories under the ‘Russia’ umbrella generally
fall into one of three categories: Russian cyber attacks; links to
Russian officials and intermediaries; alleged obstruction.”
There is, however, another aspect of the Russia story, a category altogether missing in the Times’ classification scheme, an obviously thorny topic that almost no one wants to discuss: the proverbial elephant in the room.
It concerns the extensive background to the 2016 campaign – the
relationship between the United States and Russia over the long arc of
the twentieth century, and, especially, the years since the end of the
Cold War. This aspect is complicated, involving all five US
administrations since the Soviet Union dissolved itself at the end of
1991. It is a difficult story to tell.
I backed into it slowly, having followed for many years the
Harvard-Russia scandal of the 1990s. In 1993, the US Agency for
International Development, a semi-independent unit of the State
Department, hired Harvard University’s Institute for International
Development to provide technical economic assistance to the Russian
government on its market reforms. Eight years later, the Justice
Department sued Harvard for having let its team leaders go rogue.
Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and his deputy, Jonathan Hay, were
accused of investing in Russian securities, and of having established
their wives at the head the line to obtain a license to enter the
nascent Russian mutual fund industry. The suit was settled in 2005. The
government recovered most of the money it had spent. The incident played
a part in Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’s resignation
the following winter. As Shleifer’s friend and mentor, Summers had
distanced himself via recusal.
After Boris Yeltsin had died, in 2007, I wrote a column
about the failures of US policies in the 1990s. Thereafter I followed
developments with increasing interest and alarm, particularly after the
Ukraine crisis of 2014. And in the summer of 2016, when it seemed likely
that Hillary Clinton would be elected president, I set out to collect
some of the columns I had written and to add some additional narrative
material in order to call attention to the entanglements she and her
advisers would bring to the job. That project was supposed to take one
year. It took two.
Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years
(CreateSpace) was finally published on Amazon last week – 300 pages and
a relative bargain at $15. Alas, almost as quickly as the book went on
sale, Amazon took it down, to make sure I actually owned the collected
columns: their cloud computers had discovered these were also “freely
available on the web” — in the archives of Economic Principals. Artificial intelligence at work: shoot first and ask questions afterwards. As of May 24, Because They Could is back in print.The book consists of three main parts.
The first is a recap of the scandal as it appeared in the newspapers, from the front page of The Wall Street Journal,
in August 1997; to Harvard’s decision, in March 2001, to try the case
rather than settle the government suit; to September 2013, when Summers
withdrew from the competition with Janet Yellen to head the Fed. These
29 columns, written as the story unfolded, introduce first-time readers
to the scandal, and remind experts of what and when we knew and how we
knew it.
The second part concerns the Portland, Maine, businessman whom the
Harvard team leaders inveigled to start a mutual fund back-office firm
in Russia, then forced out of its ownership. It turns out there was a
second suit, overlooked for the most part because Harvard settled,
paying an undisclosed sum in return for a non-disclosure agreement. This
now-familiar tactic insured that John Keffer, whose Forum Financial at
that point was one of the largest independently-owned mutual fund
administrators in the world, and a significant presence in Poland, would
be unable to tell his story. Only his filings and the massive
documentation of the government case remained.
The third consists of six short essays on aspects of the US
relationship with Russia since 1991. These relate a brief history of
NATO expansion, which took place despite the administration of George
H.W. Bush pledging in exchange for Russia agreeing to the reunification
of Germany that the US would not further enlarge NATO; tell something of
the US press corps in Moscow during those twenty-five years; identify a
key issue in Russian historiography; express some sympathy for ordinary
Russians and even for Vladimir Putin himself; and seek to separate the
accidental presidency of Donald Trump from all the rest, the better to
understand why he has so little standing in in the matter.
Also included is a short paean to the news values of The Wall Street Journal
and two appendices. One is Shleifer’s letter to Harvard provost Albert
Carnesale as the USAID investigation built to its climax. The other is
the heavily-annotated business plan, drafted by Hay’s then-girlfriend,
Elizabeth Hebert, later his wife, to make it appear to have been written
by Hay, and backed financially by Shleifer’s wife, hedge-fund
proprietor Nancy Zimmerman, offering control of Keffer’s company to Thomas Steyer, of Farallon Capital (who had been Ms. Zimmerman’s principal backer), and Peter Aldrich, of AEW Capital Management, a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Preparing to espouse these unpopular views has made me snap to
attention on the rare occasions when they are expressed in the
mainstream press – not on the op-ed pages, where they mostly represent
reflexive ballast-balancing, but in the news pages, where some deeper
form of institutional judgment is at work. That was the case last
Sunday, when an 8,600-word article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine presented the case that the United States shared the blame for the current disorder. “The Quiet Americans”
startled me (though not the designer, who illustrated it with a
standard what-makes-Russia-tick? design). The dispatch itself was a
significant advance in the other Russia story....
The guy is not just arrogant. He was way, way wrong. Summers will be
leaving the administration to "persue other interests" Here's the video from PBS...
Gene editing stands to accelerate the engineering
of microbes for industrial production of food ingredients,
pharmaceuticals, biofuels, chemicals and biomaterials. There is a risk,
however, that microbial biotechnologies could destabilize economies and
employment in the developing world that depend on supplying naturally
occurring ingredients. For example, a biosynthetic process for making a
precursor of the antimalarial drug artemisinin has been developed, which
could threaten the jobs of farmers who harvest its natural source, the
plant Artemisia annua.
Google and Facebook’s “Kill Zone”: “We’ve Taken the Focus Off of Rewarding Genius and Innovation to Rewarding Capital and Scale”
A Stigler Center panel explores the implications of tech giants’ dominance on innovation and startups.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin joined a growing number of public officials concerned
about the impact of Internet monopolies when he called
on the Justice Department to look into the power that digital platforms
like Google have over the US economy. “These are issues the Justice
Department needs to look at seriously,” he told CNBC,
“not for any one company, but obviously as these technology companies
have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have
to look at the power they have.”
Mnuchin’s comments followed a 60 Minutes report
that examined the enormous power Google wields over potential
competitors thanks to its monopoly in online search and search
advertising. “If I were starting out today, I would have no shot of
building Yelp,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp,
during the segment. Yelp has long argued that Google has abused its
dominance in local search to favor its own services over competitors
such as itself, and is currently attempting to convince European competition authorities to launch a fresh antitrust case against the company.
“If you provide great content in one of
these categories that is lucrative to Google, and seen as potentially
threatening, they will snuff you out,” added Stoppelman. “They will make
you disappear. They will bury you.”
The sentiment that startups effectively
have no chance of competing against the “Big Five” tech giants—Alphabet,
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—is one that has become
increasingly common among tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in
recent years. “People are not getting funded because Amazon might one
day compete with them,” one founder told The Guardian.
“If it was startup versus startup, it would have been a fair fight, but
startup versus Amazon and it’s game over.” As the author and media
scholar Jonathan Taplin pointed out in an interview with ProMarket,
the very notion that someone could start a new search engine that
competes with Google “is just laughed at by the venture capital
community.”
Investors and entrepreneurs, said the
venture capitalist Albert Wenger during a panel discussion at the
Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference last month, are now wary of
entering into direct competition with giants like Google and Facebook.
Both companies, along with Amazon and Apple, effectively have a “Kill
Zone” around them—areas not worth operating or investing in, since
defeat is guaranteed.
Tech platforms, after all, have endless
resources at their disposal to either purchase or crush new upstarts
they perceive as threats. Increasingly, startups that operate in areas
coveted by tech giants face a similar choice: sell—or get crushed. The
Big Five have made over 436 acquisitions
in the last decade, with little to no challenge from antitrust
authorities. When startups refuse to sell, they find themselves facing
an unlevel playing field. Snapchat, which turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013 (and a $30 billion bid
from Google in 2016), is a case in point: after it failed to acquire
Snapchat, Facebook simply cloned many of Snapchat’s key features, using
its vast reach to completely undercut its growth. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
“The Kill Zone is a real thing,” said
Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and an early
investor in Twitter. “The scale of these companies and their impact on
what can be funded, and what can succeed, is massive.” He went on to
quote one angel investor who told him that he only invests “in things
that are not in Facebook’s, Apple’s, Amazon’s or Google’s kill zone.”
The kill zone, noted Wenger, is not a new
phenomenon. Microsoft had a similar kill zone around it when it
dominated the tech industry in the late 1990s. “It was a similar
playbook, where Microsoft would see, ‘What kind of things are doing well
on my platform?’” he said. “Then they would just absorb those into the
platform itself. That is a playbook that’s being exercised by Amazon, by
Google, by Facebook, by all the big digital platforms.”
All this has profound implications for
the startup ecosystem and for the future of innovation. Is the dominance
of digital platforms, routinely hailed as the most innovative companies
in the world, actually hindering innovation? Much of the Stigler Center
panel, moderated by Fortune magazine’s executive editor Adam
Lashinsky, revolved around this very question. In addition to Wenger, it
featured patent expert Elvir Causevic, managing director and co-head of
Houlihan Lokey’s Tech+IP Advisory practice; Glen Weyl,
a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a senior
research scholar at Yale’s economics department and law school; and Matt
Perault, director of public policy at Facebook.
While opinions as to how to address the
power of digital platforms and spur innovation varied wildly, most of
the panelists seemed to agree on one basic premise: the size and scope
of digital platforms has become an impediment to innovation.
“Small Companies No Longer Have Access to Patent Protection”
Innovation used to be associated with
small companies and entrepreneurs. There’s a reason why the garage has
taken such an important place in the mythology of the tech industry:
Silicon Valley, as we know it, is the product of entrepreneurs starting
companies in their garages, from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the
late 1930s, through Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, to Larry
Page and Sergey Brin in the 1990s.
But the vaunted garage is little more than a myth in
today’s Silicon Valley. The rise of digital platforms has been
correlated with a historic decline in startups: new business formation
in the US has declined by more than 40 percent since the late 1970s and is near a 40-year low. At the same time, as the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo pointed out last year, the technology industry has gradually become “a playground for giants.”...MUCH MORE
We're a month late getting to this but it's important for the maintenance of the resource and we'll probably be referring back to the tech if not the fishies.
From Reuters via gCaptain:
In 2016, a Thai-flagged fishing vessel was detained in Seychelles on
suspicion that it had been fishing illegally in the Indian Ocean, one of
the world’s richest fishing grounds.
The Jin Shyang Yih 668 was caught with help from technology deployed
by FISH-i Africa, a grouping of eight east African countries including
Tanzania, Mozambique and Kenya.
But as the vessel headed to Thailand, which pledged to investigate
and prosecute the case, it turned off its tracking equipment and
disappeared. Its whereabouts remain unknown.
Such activity is rampant in the global fishing industry, experts say,
where illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is estimated to
cost $23.5 billion a year.
However, a range of non-profit and for-profit organizations that are
developing technology solutions to tackle IUU say it is a matter of time
before vessels can no longer vanish.
“The industry is developing very fast … basically the oceans will be
fully traceable. There is no place to hide,” said Roberto Mielgo
Bregazzi, the co-founder of Madrid-based FishSpektrum, one of the few
for-profit platforms.
EAGLE-EYED
With backing from Google, Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Leonardo
DiCaprio, among others, such platforms also track fishing on the high
seas and in marine reserves, aided by radio and satellite data that send
vessels’ locations and movements.
They use satellite imagery, drones, algorithms and the ability to
process vast amounts of data, as well as old-fashioned sleuthing and
analysis, to help countries control their waters.
Algorithms could identify illegal behavior, Mielgo Bregazzi told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation, including predicting when a fishing vessel
was about to meet its quota, triggering an alarm.
Bradley Soule, the chief fisheries analyst at OceanMind, a
non-profit, said technology can help even rich countries, which might
otherwise struggle to process the volume of data broadcast by hundreds
of thousands of vessels.
Organizations such as his crunch that data and help to differentiate between normal and suspicious activity.
“The bulk of the threat is non-compliance by mainly legal operators
who skirt the rules when they think no one’s looking,” said Soule, who
helps Costa Rica monitor its waters.
Others go further. Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norway-based
non-profit, digs up data on a vessel’s identity, its owners, agents and
which company provides the crew. Its approach saw a South Korean ship in
2013 pay a then-record $1 million fine....
With Samsung Electronics announcing its
new artificial intelligence research lab based in Cambridge, it seems
that the race is on across Europe to develop AI centers of excellence,
with investments allocated to AI from both government and industry.
With
Samsung Electronics announcing its new artificial intelligence (AI)
research lab based in Cambridge, it seems that the race is on across
Europe to develop AI centers of excellence, with investments allocated
to AI from both government and industry.
The Samsung AI Center, Cambridge (SAIC-Cambridge) will be chaired by
Professor Andrew Blake, a pioneer in the development of the theory and
algorithms for computer vision and former director of Microsoft’s
Cambridge Laboratory. With this center, Samsung aims to expand its
R&D workforce in the U.K., including AI experts, from the current
250 to 400 in the near future.
This is part of a global plan from Samsung Research, the
advanced R&D hub of Samsung Electronics. In addition to the U.K.
hub, it also announced the opening of a new center in Toronto, Canada,
and Moscow, Russia, bringing its total number of AI development centers
to five, taking into account the ones that it already has in Seoul,
Korea, and Silicon Valley in the U.S.
In Cambridge, U.K., the institute opens up new opportunities for
fundamental research in AI and will facilitate greater cooperation with
the U.K.’s academic community on the development of advanced
technologies. Seunghwan Cho, executive vice president of Samsung
Electronics, said, “This new artificial intelligence research center in
Cambridge is one of the key milestones in the long-term strategy of the
company. In this new world of connected devices and services based on
AI, Samsung’s vision is to help people do their jobs and live their
lives better.”
Because AI is being adopted in virtually every facet of today’s
day-to-day lives and society, Samsung says, “We are at the brink of
realizing near-exponential possibilities to make our lives easier
through this powerful new technology.” Internet of Things (IoT) devices
embedded with AI are expected to generate a vast array of data that can
provide insights into lives, analyze complex usage patterns, and
seamlessly enable intelligent services.
The press statement from Samsung says that the company chose the
Cambridge area because it is a global epicenter of machine learning and
one of the world’s foremost hubs for AI research and development, home
not only to world-class talent but also some of the most well-renowned
AI scholars with whom it will cooperate closely. The company will
implement the results of its global network of AI research centers —
including Cambridge — by building an open ecosystem of devices
leveraging user-oriented AI to bring value back to users.
Professor Blake: a pioneer in computer vision
Professor Andrew Blake added, “The center’s research will help us to
better understand human behavior, exploring areas like emotion
recognition, and further expand the boundaries of user-centric
communication to develop AI technologies that ultimately improve
people’s lives.”
Professor Blake has a long history in electronics, computer vision,
and artificial intelligence and was previously also a research director
at The Alan Turing Institute. He founded the computer vision group at
Microsoft in 1999, and in 2011, he and colleagues at Microsoft Research
received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for their
machine-learning contribution to Microsoft Kinect’s human
motion-capture. Previously, at Oxford University, he was a pioneer in
the development of the theory and algorithms that make it possible for
computers to behave as seeing machines.
Between 1978 and 1980, he was a scientist with the electro-optics
group of Ferranti in Edinburgh. He is currently also a scientific
advisor to FiveAI, a developer of autonomous vehicles, which plans to
demonstrate trial passenger services in London in late 2019.
U.K. and EU AI research funding heats up
The Samsung news comes after both the European Union (EU) and the
U.K. government both indicated their announcements to develop the best
in AI research capabilities. In April, we highlighted how chipmakers are expanding R&D in France’s new AI push. Since then, both the U.K. and the EU have made indications of further investment in AI....MORE
After what a 15-sigma event yesterday in the Italian bond market, a reprieve today has seen the euro recover a cent from yesterday's lows. While the political situation in Italy is worrisome, many observers suspect that the new banking rules exacerbated the illiquidity that explains outsized moves. Italy's 10-year bond yield is off nearly 20 bp today, and the two-year yield is off almost 90 bp. Italian stocks have also stabilized, gaining about 0.5% near midday. IWith the highest coupons in several years, Italy's bond auction was well received in terms of bid-to-cover ratios.
To be sure the political situation remains unresolved. It seems that the Five Star Movement is more willing to find a solution short of elections, but the League is taking more strident tones. Perhaps the strategy is rational and not driven by personalities. The latest SWG poll covering May23-May28 showed the League with 27.5% support, up from around 17% in the March election. M5S, on the other hand, has seen its support slip to 29.5% from nearly 33% in March. Weekly tracking polls concur that the League is the only party that has gained support since the election.
Outside of Italy, and Spain, which holds a confidence vote at the end of the week, the other notable development has been heightened trade tensions. Pressure was going to mount in any event, ahead of the June 1 expiration of the exemptions from the US steel and aluminum tariffs. While Europe has been lobbying hard for a permanent exemption, it does not seem likely. NAFTA negotiations are ongoing, and it is not clear what the Trump Administration will do for Canada and Mexico. However, adding to this the Administration indicated that it is moving forward with the tariff on $50 bln of Chinese imports to retaliate for intellectual property right violations.
Reportedly, a list of specific products will be released in around two weeks. New curbs may be announced on sensitive technology as well, ahead of the next round of talks that are to begin in a few days. New restrictions on Chinese investment in the US and enhanced export controls are thought to be ready by the end of next month.
Recall that when the US first announced the actions on intellectual property, China threatened to retaliate. That is when Trump countered with a threat of tariffs on another $100 bln of Chinese goods. This time there did not seem to be an immediate response.
Economic data released today may have helped soothe investors' nerves. Both Japan and Germany reported considerably stronger retail sales than the market expected. In Japan, April retail sales rose 1.4%. The median forecast was for a 0.5% increase after a 0.7% decline in March. German retail sales rose 2.3% in April. It is the largest increase since October 2016. The median forecast was for a 0.5% increase. The March decline was shaved to 0.4% from -0.6%.
Separately, Germany reported a strong employment report. Unemployment fell by 11k in May, which nearly matches the three-month average. Unemployment fell by an average of almost 22k a month in 2017. The unemployment rate unexpectedly edged down to 5.2% from 5.3%. Germany states also reported preliminary May CPI figures and the national report will be released shortly....
Winemakers in western France in the famed
Bordeaux and Cognac areas were inspecting damage to their vines on
Sunday after an "unprecedented" storm saw pebble-sized hailstones cause
widespread destruction.
The bad weather struck around midday on Saturday in the Gironde area
where many of France's most well-known red wines originate, as well as
further north in the Charente and Charente-Maritime regions.
"It's a shock, it was a hailstorm of unprecedented violence for 10
minutes," the head of a winegrowers association in the Cotes-de-Bourg
area, Didier Gontier, told Franceinfo radio on Sunday.
He said that an area of around 2,000 hectares had been affected which
could bankrupt some growers, particularly those already affected by a
late frost last year, he added....MORE
Bill Browder has previously spoken of his fear that he will be killed by the Russian government
A British businessman branded a "serial killer" by Russian President Vladimir Putin has been arrested in Spain.
Bill Browder, who has previously said he fears for his life, said he was arrested on an Interpol arrest warrant this morning.
Mr Browder has led a campaign calling for justice after his Russian
lawyer died in prison after uncovering a huge fraud believed to involve
Russian officials.
Earlier this year the hedge-fund manager, one
of the Kremlin's most high-profile public enemies, told MPs: “What the
Russians would like to do more than anything is arrest me and get me
back to Russia and then kill me in the control of their own system."
And he added: “I’m at risk, at high risk. I don’t spend my life living in fear, but I am definitely at risk.”...MORE
Keynote speech at ECFR's Annual Council Meeting in Paris 29 May. 2018.
Check against delivery.
It is good to be here. Thank you. I think this is the right place to discuss how to save Europe.
The European Union is in an existential
crisis. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. First I will
briefly explain how this happened and then I will explore what can be
done to reverse the trend.
In my youth, a small band of visionaries
led by Jean Monnet transformed the European Coal and Steel Community
into the European Common Market and then the European Union.People of my
generation were enthusiastic supporters of the process.
I personally regarded the European
Union as the embodiment of the idea of the Open Society. It was a
voluntary association of equal states that banded together and
sacrificed part of their sovereignty for the common good. The idea of
Europe as an open society continues to inspire me.
But since the financial crisis of 2008
the European Union seems to have lost its way. It adopted a program of
fiscal retrenchment which led to the euro crisis. This transformed the
Eurozone into a relationship between creditors and debtors where the
creditors set the conditions that the debtors had to meet. The debtors
couldn’t meet those conditions and that created a relationship that is
neither voluntary nor equal.
As a result, many young people today
regard the European Union as an enemy that has deprived them of jobs
and a secure and promising future. Populist politicians exploited the
resentments and formed anti-European parties and movements.
Then came the refugee crisis of 2015. At
first most people sympathized with the plight of refugees fleeing from
political repression or civil war, but they didn’t want their
everyday lives disrupted by a breakdown of social services. They were
also disappointed by the failure of the authorities to cope with the
crisis.
When that happened in Germany, the AfD
was empowered and it has grown into the largest opposition party. Italy
has suffered from a similar experience recently and the political
repercussions have been even more disastrous: the anti-European
parties almost took over the government. Italy is now facing elections
in the midst of political chaos.
Indeed the whole of Europe has been
disrupted by the refugee crisis. Unscrupulous leaders have exploited it
even in countries that have accepted hardly any refugees. In Hungary,
Victor Orban based his reelection campaign on falsely accusing me of
planning to flood Europe, Hungary included, with Muslim refugees.
He is now posing as the defender of his
version of a Christian Europe that is challenging the values on which
the European Union was founded. He is trying to take over the leadership
of the Christian Democratic parties, which form the majority in the
European Parliament.
In recent weeks not just Europe but the
whole world has been shocked by President Trump’s actions. He has
unilaterally withdrawn from a nuclear arms treaty with Iran thereby
effectively destroying the transatlantic alliance. This development will
put additional pressure of unpredictable force on an already
beleaguered Europe. It is no longer a figure of speech to say that
Europe is in existential danger; it is the harsh reality.
What can be done to save Europe?
Europe faces three pressing problems: the
refugee crisis; territorial disintegrations as exemplified by Brexit;
and the austerity policy that has hindered Europe’s economic
development. Bringing the refugee crisis under control may be the
best place to start.
I have always advocated that the
allocation of refugees within Europe should be entirely voluntary.
Member states should not be forced to accept refugees they don’t want
and refugees should not be forced to settle in countries where they
don’t want to go.
The voluntary principle ought to guide
Europe’s migration policy. Europe must also urgently reform or repeal
the so-called Dublin Regulations which have put an unfair burden on
Italy and other Mediterranean countries with disastrous political
consequences.
The EU must protect its external borders
but keep them open for lawful migrants. Member states in turn must not
close their internal borders. The idea of a “fortress Europe” closed to
political refugees and economic migrants alike violates both European
and international law and in any case it is totally unrealistic.
Europe wants to extend a helping hand
towards Africa (and other parts of the developing world) by
offering substantial assistance to democratically inclined regimes. This
would enable them to provide education and employment to their
citizens. They would be less likely to leave and those who did would not
qualify as refugees. At the same time, European countries could welcome
migrants from these and other countries to meet their economic
needsthrough an orderly process. In this way migration would be
voluntary both on the part of the migrants and the receiving
states. Such a “Marshall Plan” would also help to reduce the number of
political refugees by strengthening democratic regimes in the developing
world.
Present day reality falls substantially
short of this ideal. First and most importantly, the European Union
still doesn’t have a unified migration policy. Each member state has its
own policy, which is often at odds with the interests of other
states.
Second, the main objective
of most European countries is not to foster democratic development but
to stem the flow of migrants. This diverts a large part of the available
funds to dirty deals with dictators, bribing them to prevent
migrants from passing through their territory or to
use repressive measures to prevent their citizens from leaving. In the
long-run this will generate more political refugees.
Third, there is a woeful shortage of
financial resources. We estimate that a meaningful Marshall
Plan for Africa would require at least 30 billion euros a year for a
number of years. Member states could contribute only a small fraction of
this amount even if they were ready to do so.
How might such a plan be
financed then? It’s important to recognize that the refugee crisis is a
European problem and it needs a European solution. The European Union
has a high credit rating and its borrowing capacity is largely unused.
When should that capacity be put to use if not in an existential crisis?
Throughout history, the national debt always grew at times of
war. Admittedly, adding to the national debt runs counter to the
prevailing addiction to austerity; but the austerity policy is itself a
contributing factor to the crisis in which Europe finds itself.
Until recently it could have been argued
that the austerity is working and we must persevere with it because the
European economy is slowly improving. But looking ahead we are now
facing the termination of the nuclear arms deal with Iran and the
destruction of the transatlantic alliance. This is bound to have a
negative effect on the European economy and cause other dislocations.
The strength of the dollar is already precipitating a flight
from emerging market currencies. We may be heading
for another major financial crisis. The economic stimulus of a Marshall
Plan should kick in just at the right time.
That is what has led me to put forward
an out-of-the-box proposal for financing it. I won’t go into the details,
but I want to point out that the proposal contains an ingenious
device that would enable the European Union to borrow from the market at
a very advantageous rate without incurring a direct obligation for
itself or for its member states. This also offers
considerable accounting benefits. Moreover, although it
is anout-of-the-box proposal, it has already been successfully used in
other contexts, mainly in general revenue municipal bonds in the US
and also in surge funding for infectious diseases.
But my main point is that an existential
crisis is no longer a figure of speech but the harsh reality. Europe
needs to do something drastic to escape it. It needs to reinvent
itself.
That is what President Macron sought to
initiate by proposing what he calls Citizens’
Consultations. This initiative needs to be a genuinely grassroots
effort. The transformation of the Coal and Steel Community into the
European Union was a top-down effort and it worked wonders. But times
have changed. Ordinary people feel excluded and ignored. Now we need a
collaborative effort that combines the top-down approach of the European
institutions with the bottom-up initiatives that are necessary to
engage the electorate.
I mentioned three pressing problems. I
have addressed two of them: migration and austerity. That
leaves territorial disintegration exemplified by Brexit. I don’t have
time to deal with other examples, especially in the Balkans. I will
do so in a separate article to be published next week.
Brexit is an immensely damaging process,
harmful to both sides. Most of the damage is felt right now when the
European Union is in an existential crisis, but its attention is
diverted to negotiating a separation agreement with Britain. That’s a
lose-lose proposition, but it could be converted into a win-win
situation.
Divorce will be a long process, probably
taking more than five years. Five years is an eternity in politics,
especially in revolutionary times like the present. Ultimately, it’s up
to the British people to decide what they want to do. It would be
better however if they came to a decision sooner rather than
later. That’s the goal of an initiative called the “Best for
Britain,”which I support.
Best for Britain fought for, and helped to
win, a meaningful parliamentary vote which includes the option of not
leaving at all.
This would be good
for Britain but would also render Europe a great service by rescinding
Brexit and not creating a hard-to-fill hole in the European budget.
But the British public must express its support by a convincing margin
in order to be taken seriously by Europe. That’s what the Best for
Britain is aiming for by engaging the electorate. It will publish its
manifesto in the next few days.
The economic case for remaining a member
of the EU is strong, but it will take time for it to sink in. During
that time the EU needs to transform itself into an association that
countries like Britain would want to join, in order to strengthen the
political case.
Such a Europe would differ from the
current arrangements in two key respects. First, it would clearly
distinguish between the European Union and the Eurozone. Second, it
would recognize that the euro has many unresolved problems and they must
not be allowed to destroy the European Union.
The EU is governed by outdated treaties
that assert that all member states are expected to join the euro if and
when they qualify. This has created an absurd situation where countries
like Sweden, Poland and the Czech Republic have made it clear that they
have no intention to join, yet they are still described and treated as
“pre-ins”.
The effect is not purely cosmetic. It has
converted the EU into an organization in which the Eurozone constitutes
the inner-core and the other members are relegated to an inferior
position. There is a hidden assumption at work here, namely that various
member states may be moving at different speeds but they are allheading
to the same destination. This has given rise to the claim of
“an ever-closer union” that has been explicitly rejected by a number of
countries.
This claim must be abandoned. Instead of a
multi-speed Europe we should aim at a “multi-track Europe” that would
allow member states a wider variety of choices. This would have a
far-reaching beneficial effect. Right now, attitudes towards cooperation
are negative: member states want to reassert their sovereignty rather
than surrender more of it. But if cooperation produced positive results,
attitudes may improve and some objectives, like defense, that
are currently best pursued by coalitions of the willing may qualify for
universal participation.
Harsh reality may force member states
to set aside their national interests in the interest of preserving the
European Union. That’s what President Macron was urging in his Aachen
speech and he was cautiously endorsed by Chancellor Merkel who is
painfully aware of the opposition she faces at home.
If Macron and Merkel succeeded in spite of
all the obstacles, they would follow in the footsteps of Jean Monnet
and his small band of visionaries. As I said before, that small band
needs to be replaced by a large upsurge of grass-roots pro-European
initiatives. I and my network of Open Society Foundations will do
everything in our power to help support those initiatives.
Thank you.
### End of speech ### Check against delivery.
George Soros Founder and Chair, Open Society Foundations.
Seattle is an innovator in a lot of things — from speciality coffee to cloud computing to commercial spacecraft.
Could that innovation now spread to municipal tax codes?
Seattle last week gained national attention after the City Council passed a so-called “head tax,” which levies a $275 tax per employee per year
on companies with annual revenue of $20 million or more. The
controversial tax, which would raise about $45 to $49 million, was
applauded by affordable housing advocates, but criticized by members of
the business and tech community, arguing that it amounts to a tax on
jobs.
Now, the concept of taxing big corporations — in an effort to build
affordable housing and offer homeless services — is catching on Silicon
Valley.
Bloomberg’s Eric Newcomer reports
that San Francisco, Mountain View, Cupertino and East Palo Alto are now
considering similar taxes to the legislation passed in Seattle,
potentially changing the dynamic between big tech companies and the
communities in which they operate.
“Google has billions of dollars in cash floating around,” Mountain
View mayor Lenny Siegel told Bloomberg. “They made billions off the tax
bill. They can afford to spend a little more here.”
Google is headquartered in Mountain View, but also maintains a
sizable operation in the Seattle area, with engineering offices in
Kirkland (not subject to the head tax) and Seattle’s Fremont
neighborhood (subject to the head tax). It has a market value of $746
billion.
Mountain View is considering a head tax of $250 to $300 per employee,
with Bloomberg reporting that the city council is considering a vote
for next month. It would raise about $10 million. Cupertino — home to
Apple’s headquarters — also is considering a head tax to fund housing
and transportation, as is East Palo Alto, which just voted to send the
measure to voters this November....MORE
Is it any wonder the satire sites are struggling?* Just kidding, that's an attempt at a cheap laugh, Simmons is actually pretty sharp, though a bit pretentious.
Here's Barron's, May 25:
KISS frontman Gene Simmons stopped by recently to talk with Barron’s
about the music business, investing, politics, and his latest business
ventures, including soda and cannabis. Our conversation, below, has been
edited for length and clarity.
Barron’s: If KISS were starting out now in the age of music streaming, would you be as successful?
Gene Simmons: You’d have to go back in a time
machine to when there was civility and structure, because it’s chaos
now. As soon as Napster and schmapster and schmeckle-head and all the
rest of them started to download and file-share for free—stealing—it was
the hole that sunk the Titanic.
I’m a rich son of a b— and all
that, but we came before. It breaks my heart that a new band starting
today doesn’t have a chance in hell of making it. There’s no model that
works. There’s plenty of talent out there, but play a quick game: From
1958 to 1988 you had Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi
Hendrix, David Bowie, and Madonna. But since 1988, who are the new
Beatles?
Who is the greatest American rock band of all time?
KISS!
Second-greatest?
The Americans don’t have
it. We invented this thing—rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll, all
that—but the English do it much better. The Beatles and the Stones and
just a thousand bands. In America. . .the Grateful Dead? Bums with
guitars around their necks. Guys that should be on Duck Dynasty instead
of onstage. Three Dog Night. . .Three Dog Night?
What about Creedence Clearwater Revival?
But you don’t care who’s in it. They’re not stars. The English are stars.
You have a tour coming up—a farewell tour.
I didn’t say that.
OK, a tour. The Wall Street Journal reports that Taylor Swift is raising ticket prices to combat scalping, even if some seats go unsold. Is that a good idea?
That’s
called capitalism. Supply and demand. Everything is arbitrary. You
stretch the rubber band as far as it can go before it snaps. You would
rather stretch more if it can go. Taylor can raise her ticket prices.
She is enormously popular, and she’ll do just fine. Now, can a reunion
of Three Dog Night do that? No—because the demand isn’t there.
What’s the most you have ever heard of someone paying for a seat at a KISS concert?
Fifty grand.
Do you know that person?
Well sure, because we charge 50 grand now for me to visit your home and tell you how nice your curtains are for two hours.
You spoke at the Money Show in Las Vegas. Do you handle your own investments?
I
don’t sit at home and press buttons and buy. I like to keep my snoot
close to the ground, and anything I decide to invest in I actually know
something about. The Warren Buffett school of do your goddamn due
diligence, kick the tires yourself, learn as much as you can, and
then—from a position of being informed—tell your guys, you know, “I
think this is good. What do you think?”
Do you invest in Spotify Technology?
No.
You’re buying perception. Perception is value. We agree that diamonds
and gold are valuable because we agree on it. If women weren’t
interested in diamonds, diamonds would be f—.
Are you optimistic about the stock market?
Yes.
When I rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in 2008, the Dow
was right under 8000. A broadcaster asked me what I thought about
disaster—Black Friday, Sunny Tuesday, and so on. I said, what are you
talking about? America invented this. In other countries, the despots
and dictators invest in America. Am I the first one saying buy low, sell
high? It’s a good time. You like biotech? Buy biotech. You eat burgers?
Buy McDonald’s.
Invest in what you know. We are now at 24,700, something like that, and
there is no question in my mind we are going to go past 30,000.
At
the end of the day the masses aren’t aware of the market or where the
Dow is. All they want to know is, can I feed my family and is the
country safe? One is political and the other is economic. You try to
pick, hopefully, the people who can represent you that can fulfill those
two wishes
We should look at ourselves the way terrorists like
the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Al-Qaeda do. They think of us as just
Americans. We are the ones who say “Democrats” and all that. We see a
difference, they don’t see a difference at all. They just think we are
all Americans. Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s all be Americans, because
the people that don’t agree with you and may be on the lower
floor—actually, it’s their America as well....
Editors at semi-popular Middle East satire news website The Pan-Arabia
Enquirer yesterday revealed that they had “given up” in their
long-running struggle to keep ahead of reality.
The announcement came following last week’s news that labourers working
in Qatar had been coerced into taking part in a marathon, with many
bussed in from their dormitories and forced to run in jeans and
flip-flops as part of a failed bid to break the world record for number
of participants.
“Honestly, simply cannot compete in these sorts of conditions,” said Enquirer acting editor Baltimore Stafford in a statement.
“Over the years, we’ve had to deal with a growing trend of real-life
trying to outdo satire, especially in Saudi Arabia, but this is beyond
our capabilities. To be honest, we could have probably worked around the
whole ‘labourers forced to take part in marathon’ bit, but with the
addition of flip-flops, jeans and the fact it was a shambolic attempt to
break a record, we’ve had to concede defeat.”
I am finding it difficult to choose just one post to highlight PAE's
triumphant return so here is what one of the feedreaders looked like
earlier today (links at the timestamps):....
Bayer may get U.S. approval for the merger as soon as today.
From Reuters:
YVERDON-LES-BAINS, Switzerland/CHICAGO (Reuters) - In a field of sugar
beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on
wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and
zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles.
Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller,
the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say
could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing
the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM)
crops that tolerate them.
Dominated by companies such as Bayer,
DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of
digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting
their business models.
The stakes are high. Herbicide sales
are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides
revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide
tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall.
“Some
of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical
companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment
manufacturers,” said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the $1 billion
Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply
chain.
In response, producers such as Germany’s Bayer have sought
partners for their own precision spraying systems while ChemChina’s
Syngenta [CNNCC.UL], for example, is looking to develop crop protection
products suited to the new equipment.
While still in its infancy, the plant-by-plant approach heralds a marked shift from standard methods of crop production.
Now,
non-selective weedkillers such as Monsanto’s Roundup are sprayed on
vast tracts of land planted with tolerant GM seeds, driving one of the
most lucrative business models in the industry.
‘SEE AND SPRAY’
But ecoRobotix www.ecorobotix.com/en,
developer of the Swiss weeder, believes its design could reduce the
amount of herbicide farmers use by 20 times. The company said it is
close to signing a financing round with investors and is due to go on
the market by early 2019....MORE
As is true with so much news, The Onion was ahead of the pack with their 2005 reporting on the plowborgs of Idaho and Nebraska:
DC—The Department of HyperAgriculture announced Monday that it will
begin investigating possible restrictions on the cultivation,
implementation, and breeding of genetically modified farmers, weighing
possible safety and health risks against the farmers' dramatically
increased yield and efficiency.
"As evidenced by the many strong opinions regarding these farmers, we
can all agree that more research needs to be done," said Secretary of
HyperAgriculture Roald McDonald in a press conference this morning.
"Whatever happens, we cannot let our growing population's need for more
and better foods lead us recklessly into the creation of
'Frankenfarmers.'"
McDonald
added: "That said, I can't deny the benefits of an agricultural laborer
who subsists on common weeds, grows his own exo-overalls, sweats
pesticides, and whose six arms end in retractable plows, scythes, and
harrows."
Several larger North American corporate states are already using
GM farmers to perform specialized or time-sensitive tasks.
Monsanto-Idaho has successfully used a gene-gineered strain of Mountain
Anderson farmer....MORE
Over the years we've mentioned that one of the least stressful ways to increase the size of your net worth is to find a fire hose of money and stand next to it knowing that just being near the splashing can be worth as much as a lifetime of work in Tanzania's artisanal garnet mines.
So yeah, seeing the attraction of a half-trillion dollar flow we'll repeat the story, whether it turns out to be true or not.*
From CNBC:
With ambitious plans to transform its economy
as part of the crown prince's Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia is hoping to
boost foreign direct investment (FDI).
It hopes ambitious mega projects like the futuristic city of NEOM will attract FDI.
With ambitious plans to transform its economy as part of the crown prince's Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia is hoping to boost foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country as it embarks on a post-oil era and ambitious mega projects like the futuristic city of NEOM.
Ibrahim Al-Omar, governor of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), said foreign direct investment (FDI) was growing in Saudi Arabia.
Official figures from the World Bank show FDI net inflows were $7.453 billion in 2016 while net outflows were $8.936 in the same year.
Since then, however, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has appeared to take the reigns on t/ransforming the economy and society by introducing a raft of liberalizing reforms.
An anti-corruption purge led by the crown prince last year caused concern among some business leaders, but Al-Omar said foreign investment was now growing, but didn't give more detail.
"We have seen a growth for foreign investment — about 50 percent comparing the first quarter this year to the same period last year. Also, the (FDI) inflows we have seen about 40 percent," Al-Omar told CNBC's Hadley Gamble as she hosted a session on the Saudi Arabian FDI landscape at the Gateway Gulf investment forum in Bahrain...MORE
...I am reminded of one of the stories of the gold rushes, this one I think
happened in Colorado. The original rush was on the eastern slope of the
Rocky Mountains. A miner, tired of the competition decided to spread a
rumor that gold had been discovered on the other side of the Rockies and
as the rumor spread it was embellished and more and more of those who
were finding nothing in the Pikes Peak area decided to cross the
mountains and try their luck.
Finally, the original rumor monger announced to his remaining friends
that he was joining the migration further west. One of the friends
pointed out that he had started the tale to which he replied: "I dunno,
the way these guys are acting there must be something to it".
