Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Chicago Thugs Targeting Amazon Delivery Drivers: "Take What You Want, Just Let Me Go"
By Tyler Durden
Chicago’s rash of violence, which resulted in over 800 homicides in 2016, a 20-year record high, has seemly focused its sites on a new type of victim, Amazon delivery drivers. Accorded to a CBS affiliate, just last night another armed robbery occurred in Chicago’s violent South Side neighborhood as two masked gunmen held up a driver and stole several packages. According to CBS this was only 1 of at least 12 similar incidents over the past month.
“They walked up on me, they had ski masks and told me, ‘You know what it is.’ I put my hands up and told them take what they want, just let me go,” says the driver, who asked to remain anonymous.
The men took bags filled with packages, then drove eastbound on 84th in a black minivan.
“As long as I have my life, I don’t care too much about nothing else,” he says. “I pretty much have to go home to a wife and two kids.”
UPS is reportedly also experiencing similar robberies. The delivery company said their drivers are trained to be aware of their circumstances and to contact police if they have concerns about their surroundings.
This latest robbery comes just one week after another Amazon delivery driver was held at gunpoint in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood before the suspect took off in his truck. Per ABC:
Police said the male driver was heading back to his vehicle after making a delivery in the 3100-block of South Normal Avenue when a gunman walked up to him and demanded his keys.
The driver handed them over and the suspect took off in the Amazon truck, heading south on Normal, police said. Investigators have not yet located the vehicle.
The incident follows a string of robberies, targeting delivery drivers making deliveries in the city in recent weeks.
Since December, thieves have hit at least a half dozen different delivery trucks in Chicago, sometimes stealing just packages and in other cases making off with the trucks themselves.
An Amazon spokesperson released a short statement on the Bridgeport robbery: “Our thoughts are with the delivery associate. Amazon will cooperate with the police and our service provider to bring the perpetrator to justice.”
Seems like those delivery drones can’t come soon enough.
Source: Chicago Thugs Targeting Amazon Delivery Drivers: "Take What You Want, Just Let Me Go"
TSA found a record number of guns in carry-ons
The TSA discovered a record number of 3,391 guns in carry-on bags at airport checkpoints in 2016, and 83% were loaded. …read more
Source: TSA found a record number of guns in carry-ons
"Fake News" Facebook Lands On List Of "America’s Most Hated Companies"
By Tyler Durden
Facebook just can’t seem to catch a break lately. From questionable privacy policies and mass data collection of its users to its handling of the so-called “Fake News” epidemic (see “George Soros Is Funding Facebook’s “Third-Party Fact Checking” Organization Targeting ‘Fake News’“), Mark Zuckerberg is pissing off a lot of people these days. Unfortunately, when your entire business model is based on “friending” others, the alienation of various groups has caused enough people to “dislike” Facebook that the company has landed itself on 24/7 Wall Street’s list of “America’s Most Hated Companies.”
Coming in at #6, Facebook narrowly beat out Spirit Airlines, which, for anyone who has been left stranded by Spirit in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in the middle of winter, that speaks volumes.
- Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA)
- Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)
- Mylan (NASDAQ: MYL)
- McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD)
- Wells Fargo Bank (NYSE: WFC)
- Facebook (NASDAQ: FB)
- Spirit (NASDAQ: SAVE)
- DISH Network (NASDAQ: DISH)
- Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD)
- Sprint (NYSE: S)
- Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT)
- Charter Communications (NASDAQ: CHTR)
Meanwhile, the two largest cable providers in the country also made the
list which is astonishing given their impeccable reputation for such
helpful customer service and 100% internet reliability. But, only about 40% of
the households in the U.S. rely on those two companies for service so
it’s probably not a big deal.
But, of the top 12, Facebook was the only Silicon Valley giant to make the list despite, as 24/7 Wall Street points out, being a “boon for shareholders since it’s IPO.”
Facebook has been a boon for shareholders since its IPO.
The company’s stock is now trading over 200% higher than its 2012 Wall
Street debut. However, not everyone is pleased with the social media
platform. In recent years, the company has drawn significant
criticism over its privacy policies and the mass data collection of its
users.Recently, the company faced
sharp criticism for not doing enough to curb the spread of fake news
leading up to the U.S. presidential election. Since then, in an
apparent attempt to mend public relations, the company announced a
series of new policies aimed at identifying and flagging fake news
stories on its site.
Oh well, at least they beat Sears.
Source: "Fake News" Facebook Lands On List Of "America’s Most Hated Companies"
It’s official: Chargers will move to L.A.
The San Diego Chargers will be moving to Los Angeles and taking on a new name. …read more
Source: It’s official: Chargers will move to L.A.
Cash-Banning Harvard Professor Slams "Ignorant" Negative-Rate-Naysayers
By Tyler Durden
Not satisified with demands for banning cash in America, Harvard economics professor Ken Rogoff has lashed out at critics of negative interest rates, calling them “ignorant” in their analysis of the unprecedented measures.
As a reminder of Rogoff's recent proclamations, according to the esteemed ivory tower academic, paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. As Rogoff explains in The Wall Street Journal, getting rid of most of it – that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions – could be a big help.
Rogoff's begins by stating factoids as facts…
There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism. There are substitutes for cash—cryptocurrencies, uncut diamonds, gold coins, prepaid cards—but for many kinds of criminal transactions, cash is still king. It delivers absolute anonymity, portability, liquidity and near-universal acceptance. It is no accident that whenever there is a big-time drug bust, the authorities typically find wads of cash.
Cash is also deeply implicated in tax evasion, which costs the federal government some $500 billion a year in revenue. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a lot of the action is concentrated in small cash-intensive businesses, where it is difficult to verify sales and the self-reporting of income. By contrast, businesses that take payments mostly by check, bank card or electronic transfer know that it is much easier for tax authorities to catch them dissembling. Though the data are much thinner for state and local governments, they too surely lose big-time from tax evasion, perhaps as much as $200 billion a year.
Cash also lies at the core of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S. If American employers couldn’t so easily pay illegal workers off the books in cash, the lure of jobs would abate, and the flow of illegal immigrants would shrink drastically. Needless to say, phasing out most cash would be a far more humane and sensible way of discouraging illegal immigration than constructing a giant wall.
So to clarify – Cash (and Donald Trump) are at the center of all of America's and the world's ills and therefore – as a PhD who knows best – we must destroy it (for your own good).
And now, as Bloomberg reports, anyone who questions this, or the imposition of negative interest rates (or a tax on cash) by central banks is “ignorant.”
It’s impossible to analyze the effects of the “early experiment” with negative rates because central banks were left to themselves amid a global fiscal retrenchment, Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University, said Wednesday in an interview after speaking at the Skagen Funds annual conference in Oslo.
“I find a lot of what is written by representatives of the financial sector, they’re very hostile to negative rates, to be kind of ignorant,” he said …read more
Source: Cash-Banning Harvard Professor Slams "Ignorant" Negative-Rate-Naysayers
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What’s Truly Progressive?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
What's progressive? Pushing power, agency, skills, capital and solutions down to the individual, household, community, enterprise, town and city levels and focusing on doing more with much less.
We know what fake-Progressives support: neocon-neoliberal policies and narratives that enable elite privilege, power and Imperial pretensions.
So what's truly progressive? We can start with four things:
1. Focus on developing skills that build capital, not on issuing costly credentials controlled by cartels.
2. Accept that borrowing from future generations to pay today's expenses is morally and financially bankrupt.
3. Fix healthcare by integrating medicine with the causes of illness– lifestyle, diet, fitness, agency and culture–and decentralized programs of prevention.
4. Accept that “growth” of consumption, debt, GDP, etc. is no longer the solution, it's the problem: Degrowth is the solution.
Focusing on issuing more credentials fails students and enriches the institutions that monopolize the credentials. As I explain in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, the solution is to accredit the student, not the school.
Education that actually has value in the emerging economy is based not on jumping through hoops at enormous expense to obtain a credential, but on acquiring the skills and values needed to build capital in all its forms.
Issuing a student another credential doesn't magically lift them out of poverty; to escape poverty, people need a wealth of real-world skills and the set of soft-skills/values I call the eight essential skills in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
Accrediting the student rather than the institution will require upending the costly bureaucracy of higher education, radically reducing costs while radically improving outcomes.
Take a look at this chart of federally funded debt-serfdom, i.e. student loans, and explain what is remotely progressive about debt-serfdom in service of credentials with marginal market value.
And while we're looking at debt, look at the trajectory of federal debt and ask yourself: “does this look healthy or sustainable?” The answer is obviously no; this trajectory leads to fiscal bankruptcy, and it is morally bankrupt to burden future generations to pay today's bloated, wasteful expenses just to maintain the status quo.
It is insane to encourage an unhealthy lifestyle and then wonder why the costs of treating the illnesses we've generated are skyrocketing. The obvious solution is to look at health as an ecosystem of inputs and dynamics that interact in predictable ways. If we put garbage in, we get garbage (poor health) out. In essence, the current system relieves the participants (“patients”) of the responsibility to be part of the solution, and offers few ways for people to participate in regaining their health.
The solutions are visible, but they're not profitable to the status quo, so we get a system that is more expensive than any other on Earth while yielding subpar outcomes.
“Growth” as the solution to every problem may have worked in 1945, but runaway “growth” of debt-funded consumption was …read more
Source: What’s Truly Progressive?
