XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Friday, 5 March 2010

If O's 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. would add $9.8 T to debt - $5.6 T in interest alone -

Reading - If O's 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. would add $9.8 T to debt - $5.6 T in interest alone -

If President Obama's 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country's accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.

By 2020, the agency estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That's up from 53% of GDP in 2009.

Research done by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart has shown that such high levels of debt can cause a drag on economic growth.

The CBO cited two big contributors to the jump in debt.

One is the president's proposal to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the majority of Americans. The other is the proposal to protect middle- and upper-middle-income families from having to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

Together those proposals would cost $3 trillion between 2011 and 2020.

"It points out the unwillingness of the administration to raise the revenues to pay for the size of government being proposed," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.

If Congress doesn't act, all of the Bush tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year and there will be no protection from the AMT.

But current law is not politically realistic, many say. That's why the administration prefers to compare the cost of its proposals to what lawmakers are likely to do -- namely, extend tax cuts and fix the AMT.

Hence, the White House Budget Office estimates that under the president's proposals, $8.5 trillion would be added to the country's accrued debt over the next decade, or $1.3 trillion less than the CBO estimate.

Either scenario is unsustainable, Bixby said.

The administration has also called the budget trajectory unsustainable and the president has created a fiscal advisory commission to recommend ways lawmakers can get annual deficits down to 3% of GDP by 2015.

That's well below where it would be under the president's budget, according to estimates from both the CBO and the White House. And while his proposals would chip away at deficits in the next few years, they start to climb again thereafter. By 2020, the annual deficit as a percentage of GDP will be 5.6%, according to the CBO. The White House estimates it will be 4.2%.

But there is no guarantee the fiscal commission's recommendations will be adopted by lawmakers.

The CBO notes that its estimates incorporate the Administration's revenue and spending assumptions for policies such as health reform and climate change, because the agency didn't have sufficient details from the White House about those policies to do its own analysis.

A full analysis of the president's budget will be published later in the month, the CBO said.

Reading more -http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/05/news/economy/cbo_obama_budget/index.htm?hpt=T2

GM to Reinstate 661 Dealers out of the 1,100 who sought arbitration seeking to stay with GM -

Reading - GM to Reinstate 661 Dealers out of the 1,100 who sought arbitration seeking to stay with GM -

General Motors executives said Friday that 661 dealerships out of the 1,100 seeking to stay with GM will receive letters giving them the option to remain with the company.

GM last year told 2,000 dealerships it would revoke their franchise agreements in October 2010 as part of its restructuring. The company has said it needs to make the cuts to keep the remaining showrooms healthy.

Roughly 1,000 dealers sought arbitration.

The U.S. automaker will begin sending letters notifying some of the dealers who appealed closure that they now have the option remain with GM.

GM now has 5,500 dealerships; prior to bankruptcy it had 6,200.

The U.S. Treasury owns 60 percent of GM after the 2009 bankruptcy restructuring.

The dealerships have said they were treated unfairly and have been appealing the decision to shut them for months.

Thursday, 4 March 2010

New Mexico State Police Ordered to Write Tickets or Face Punishment

Watching - New Mexico State Police Ordered to Write Tickets or Face Punishment

German MPs suggest cash-strapped Greece should sell islands - Maybe the USA should sell a few too? -

Reading - German MPs suggest cash-strapped Greece should sell islands - Maybe the USA should sell a few too? -

Greece should sell some of its uninhabited islands to raise cash to avoid bankruptcy, two German parliamentarians from Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition suggested on Thursday.

"The Greek state must sell stakes in companies and also assets such as, for example, unpopulated islands," Frank Schäffler, a member of parliament for the pro-business Free Democrats, told the Bild daily.

Marco Wanderwitz, an MP for Merkel's own conservative Christian Democrats, said Athens should provide collateral for any money it receives from theEuropean Union to help it out of its debt crisis.

"In this case, certain Greek islands also come into question," added Wanderwitz.

"We give you cash, you give us Corfu," the Bild commented.

Greece has around 6,000 islands off its coast, of which only 227 are inhabited, according to the country's National Tourism Office website.

The cash-strapped country Wednesday launched a fresh round of draconian austerity measures in a bid to rein in a ballooning budget deficit that is more than four times above EU limits.

The Socialist government increased sales, tobacco and alcohol taxes and cut public sector holiday allowances to save €4.8 billion ($6.5 billion), equal to about two percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Pensions in the public and private sector were also frozen.

Merkel is set to hold talks with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou on Friday to discuss the situation in Greece.

Hotshot, 'Extra Small' Condoms for 12-Year-Old Boys Go on Sale -

Reading - the Hotshot, 'Extra Small' Condoms for 12-Year-Old Boys Go on Sale -

Called the Hotshot, the condom has been produced after government research showed 12 to14-year-olds did not use sufficient protection when having sex.

The study, conducted on behalf of the Federal Commission for Children and Youth, interviewed 1,480 people aged 10 to 20.

The Hotshot condoms, which cost 7fr60 (£4.70) for a packet of six, have been created by Lamprecht AG, a leading condom manufacturer in Switzerland.It showed more 12 to 14-year-olds were having sex, in comparison with the 1990s.

The company has said the UK would be "top priority" if they expanded abroad, considering that it has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

Nysse Norballe, a spokesman for the company, said: "At the moment we are only producing the Hotshot in Switzerland. But the UK is certainly a very attractive market since there is a very high rate of underage conception. The UK would definitely be top priority if we marketed abroad."

A standard condom has a diameter of 2ins (5.2cm) in comparison with the Hotshot's diameter of 1.7ins (4.5cm). Both are the same length – 7.4ins (19cm).

According to a German study of 12,970 13 to 20-year-olds, a quarter said a standard condom was too large.

Family planning groups and the Swiss Aids Federation campaigned to have the Hotshot produced after a number of studies, including the government study researched at the Centre for Development and Personality Psychology at Basel University.

Nancy Bodmer, who headed the research, said: "The result that shocked us concerned young boys who display apparently risky behaviour. They have more of a tendency not to protect themselves. They do not have a very developed sexual knowledge. They do not understand the consequences of what they are doing and leave the young girls to take care of the consequences.

"The results of this study suggest that early prevention makes sense."

The age of consent in Switzerland is 16, although if the age difference is not more than three years there will be no punishment. Other concessions exist if the older person is not more than 20 or believed the younger person to be at least 16.

The Swiss initiative comes as the UK government announces an overhaul of its teenage pregnancy strategy after new figures showed conception rate among 18s were not falling fast enough.

The UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

In 1999, the government pledged to halve the teenage conception rate within 10 years.

But data released last week from The Office for National Statistics shows it has clearly failed to make any significant impact.

Tuesday, 2 March 2010

South Florida Cops and Judges Caught Using Secret Codes On Tickets -

Watching - South Florida Cops and Judges Caught Using Secret Codes On Tickets -

15 Years Ago, the Combined Assets of the 6 Biggest Banks Totaled 17% of GDP... By 2006, 55%, Now, 63% of GDP -

Reading - 15 Years Ago, the Combined Assets of the 6 Biggest Banks Totaled 17% of GDP... By 2006, 55%, Now, 63% of GDP -

You know the big banks have gotten bigger.

As Rolfe Winkler noted last September:

For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As of June 30th, it was 39 percent.
(If the image doesn’t load, click here.)

But Simon Johnson gives an even broader perspective on how big the too big to fails have gotten:

Fifteen years ago, the combined assets of our six biggest banks totaled 17 percent of our GDP. By 2006, that number was 55 percent. Right now, it stands at 63 percent.

Johnson also points out that:

The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of theglobal market for stock underwriting.

As I've previously noted, the government created the mega-giants (they are not the product of free market competition), and their very size destroys the real economy like a massive black hole destroys the matter around it.

And as Johnson and many others have pointed out, the very size of the giant banks enables them to easily capture politicians ... about as easily as the Great Attractorcaptures galaxies.

Leap-year bug bites PlayStations - internal clocks wanted to treat 2010 as a leap year -

Reading - Leap-year bug bites PlayStations - internal clocks wanted to treat 2010 as a leap year -

Sony said problems with its PlayStation Network that kept some PlayStation 3 users from playing games on or offline has been resolved.

A posting on the PlayStation blog said Sony officials have identified the cause as a leap year bug in the clocks on their older PS3 units. The newer slim PS3 consoles were not affected.

The posting said the internal clocks wanted to treat 2010 as a leap year, making March 1 into February 29. When the clocks rolled over to March 1, Sony “verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally.”

Sony suggests that anyone continuing to have problems should adjust time setting manually or via the Internet.

But the outage frustrated many PlayStation users, who lit up blogs and message boards with angry comments. One PS3 user said the episode prompted him to go buy an Xbox 360 console.

“I've stuck with Sony through the years, but ... this failure by Sony pushed me from thinking to doing,” a user named Jumping Ship posted to CNN.com's Tech blog. “Sony lost a customer. You have to think there are more people out there doing or contemplating the same thing.”

“I find it completely unacceptable they allowed most of their customer base to endure this outage. Sony waited this out rather than take action to resolve the issue,” wrote Jamesg, another CNN.com reader. “I believe Sony was aware this would be a problem and had a plan of not addressing it. Sony should be held accountable for allowing a known defect to manifest itself in a 24-hour outage for millions of their loyal customers.”

Some Xbox 360 owners took the opportunity to taunt rival PS3 users online about the problem, while PS3 owners fired back about the “Red Ring of Death” glitches that have plagued the Xbox.

Other PS3 owners decided to wait it out and were rewarded for their patience when Sony announced the problem had been resolved.

In a post on its Web site Monday, Sony addressed the symptoms of the outage. The company said error messages and glitches included the following:

• The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.

• When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.

• When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.”

• When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”

• Users are not able to play back certain rental videos downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

German TV Channel Finds 500 Gram Tungsten Gold Bar Substitute At W.C.Heraeus Gold Foundry With Bank Origin -

Reading - German TV Channel Finds 500 Gram Tungsten Gold Bar Substitute At W.C.Heraeus Gold Foundry With Bank Origin -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKczs-7BFRI

German TV station ProSieben finds what appears to be some evocative proof of gold counterfeiting, in the form of tungsten gold substitutes coming to the W.C.Heraeus foundry, which is the world's largest privately-owned precious metals refiner and fabricator, located in Hanau, Germany. The foundry has isolated at least one 500-gram tungsten bar due for melting, originating from a (so far) unnamed bank, which as the head of the foundry stated made the unpleasant discovery that "not all the glitters is gold."

Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the US, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females -

Reading - Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the US, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females -

Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study.

New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone.

"The effects of atrazine in the long term have been shown to demasculinize or chemically castrate [frogs], combined with complete feminization of some animals," said lead researcher Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist and herpetologist at the University of Berkeley.

"We need to reconfigure how we evaluate chemicals in the environment and the impact on environmental health and public health," he said.

Hayes found that 10 percent of the exposed genetic male frogs developed into functional females who copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. The other 90 percent of the exposed male frogs expressed decreased libido, reduced sperm count and decreased fertility, among other findings.

Syngenta, a Swiss company that is the largest manufacturer of atrazine, has challenged the validity of Hayes' study.

"We haven't seen these kinds of responses that Dr. Hayes reports," said Keith Solomon, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who has served as a consultant to Syngenta. "Some of these studies are poorly conducted and are entirely inconsistent."

The new study's implications for atrazine's effect on humans is unclear. But some scientists are concerned the herbicide may pose risks to reproductive health.

One of these copulating frogs, both genetically male, has been feminized by exposure to atrazine, says a new study.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year launched a comprehensive evaluation of the herbicide to investigate any possible links between atrazine and cancer and to determine whether new restrictions are necessary. The EPA's current safety standard for atrazine in drinking water is three ppb.

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004 because it was consistently showing up in levels higher than 0.1 ppb -- its threshold for harmful chemicals -- in drinking water.

Farmers in the United States continue to use atrazine on crops.

The herbicide has been a long-standing favorite among corn, sorghum and sugarcane farmers because it is affordable and can eliminate the need for tilling the soil. Tens of millions of pounds of atrazine are used each year in the United States. Syngenta estimates that 60 million pounds were used during 2008, most of it on corn.

A 2006 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found atrazine in approximately 75 percent of stream water and about 40 percent of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested between 1992 and 2001.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy organization, released a report in August 2009 that documented spikes of atrazine in the water supplies of Midwestern and Southern agricultural areas where the pesticide is primarily applied.

Home or municipal carbon filters can remove atrazine from water but some water filtration systems in small towns are not equipped to filter out atrazine. Water systems in a handful of states have sued atrazine's manufacturers in an effort to force them to pay for removing the pesticide from drinking water.

Tim Pastoor, principal scientist for Syngenta, told CNN that the EPA's current levels for atrazine are safe and that "there is political pressure to get atrazine re-examined."

"Residues of atrazine and all our crop protection products in water do not pose a health risk for consumers," Syngenta says on its Web site.

The company also says "ongoing laboratory and field research by university scientists shows that atrazine has no effect on the survival, growth or limb deformities of frogs."

But Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the NRDC's health and environment program, believes the research by Hayes and the other University of California, Berkeley, biologists is valid.

Sass also is skeptical of Syngenta's claims.

"Their tactic is to flood the scientific literature with negative data to negate the other studies," she said. "It's only their studies that show that atrazine is not an endocrine disrupter."