Uber is halting its self-driving car program in San Francisco after the California DMV revoked the registrations for the test vehicles. …read more
Source: Uber stops self-driving car program in California
By Tyler Durden
Last year we noted, via the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, that rents in San Francisco and surrounding areas had grown so out of control that even Ivy Leaguers, like 31 year old Luke Iseman of The Wharton School, were having a hard time making ends meet. After growing tired of renting a run down, tiny apartment for $4,200 per month, Iseman decided to take a novel approach to housing. So he rented out a warehouse space and filled it with 11 steel shipping containers that he now rents out as makeshift apartments for $1,000 per month. We learn more from Bloomberg:
Luke Iseman has figured out how to afford the San Francisco Bay area. He lives in a shipping container.
The Wharton School graduate’s 160-square-foot box has a camp stove and a shower made of old boat hulls. It’s one of 11 miniature residences inside a warehouse he leases across the Bay Bridge from the city, where his tenants share communal toilets and a sense of adventure. Legal? No, but he’s eluded code enforcers who rousted what he calls cargotopia from two other sites. If all goes according to plan, he’ll get a startup out of his response to the most expensive U.S. housing market.
Iseman collects $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures parked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. Tenants include a Facebook Inc. engineer, a SolarCity Corp. programmer and a bicycle messenger.
Now, billionaire California real estate developer John Sobrato is looking to implement a similar plan in Santa Clara to house a portion of the city’s 6,500 homeless. The plan calls for converting 200 steel shipping containers into a mix of 160 and 240 square foot micro apartments that could then be rented out homeless and low-income families.
Sobrato, who has spent much of his career building office space for many of Silicon Valley’s technology giants, asked the Santa Clara City Council for exclusive negotiating rights to lease a 2.5-acre plot of city-owned land, three miles south of the San Francisco 49ers football stadium and currently leased to a Hyundai dealership. His plan for the lot calls for a mix of 160- and 240-square-foot units, large enough for a kitchenette and bathroom with shower, which he said could be fashioned out of re-purposed shipping containers.
Under the plan, the developer asked for a 57-year lease at the cost of $1 a year. In return, the Sobrato Organization, based in Cupertino, would build and own the apartments, then lease them back to Santa Clara County, which would hire property management and homeless service providers. The project, called Innovation Place, could open as soon as 2018, with half the units rented to homeless and half offered to renters earning between 50 and 80 percent of the area’s median income.
Mock ups of the proposed housing complex were presented at the Santa Clara city counsel meeting:
<img src="http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user230519/imageroot/2016/12/22/2016.12.21%20-%20Shipping%20Container%20Homes%203_0.JPG" alt="Container …read more
Source: San Fran Billionaire Luanches Plan To House Homeless In Shipping Containers
By Tyler Durden
With Bitcoin at 3 year highs, China’s renewed efforts to curb declines in its currency are doing little to stop yuan bears who have sent forward devaluation expectations to record highs and options positioning to six-month lows. And judging by Goldman Sachs' outlook – a potential resurgence in Chinese growth fears early next year, but more broadly, a continued bumpy deceleration – things are not getting better anytime soon.
As Bloomberg notes, traders have turned increasingly negative amid tighter liquidity, sending bets for further losses soaring. The gap between forward contracts wagering on the offshore yuan a year from now versus its current level is heading for a record monthly jump…
Just as the extra cost for options to sell the currency against the dollar hit a six-month high relative to prices for contracts to buy.
The currency is facing a triple whammy of accelerating capital outflows, faster U.S. interest-rate increases and concerns over domestic financial markets as liquidity tightens. Strategists say its weakening, set to be the biggest this year in more than two decades, may accelerate as the government restores the annual quota for citizens to convert yuan holdings into foreign exchange. And Goldman Sachs warns, China remains a key risk to watch…
Where we stand now:
Broader concerns about China risk derailing global growth and markets proved somewhat short-lived. After the S&P 500 hit its low for the year on February 11, two days after we published, better economic data and a sense that the Fed would react to global concerns—confirmed by the dovish March FOMC meeting—helped improve market sentiment. Political events in the western hemisphere have since broadly taken center stage in global markets, leaving China concerns in the background. But the reality is that growth—on some level—did take a hit; for example, US GDP growth came in at an anemic 1.1% annualized in 1H2016, owing in part to weakness in the industrial sector and energy-related activity but largely due to tighter financial conditions primarily in the wake of China concerns. China growth itself also remained relatively weak in 1H as measured by the GS China Current Activity Indicator, which declined towards 4% in 1Q and began to climb slowly thereafter.
Stabilizing growth in China has helped push China to the background of investor concerns. In order to stabilize growth and meet official GDP targets, China’s policymakers continued to pursue an ambitious stimulus plan begun in early 2015 that entailed pausing fiscal reforms, sharply cutting interest rates, loosening housing policies, and increasing credit growth. The result: GDP growth looks set to meet the target of 6.5%-7% for 2016, and producer prices are rising after years of deflation.
But policies that re-ignited growth in the short-term just increase concern about the future, especially in terms of credit. We estimate that total credit growth adjusted for muni bond issuance accelerated from 13% yoy in 1Q15 to 17% yoy as of 2Q16, and to 20% yoy when including shadow lending not captured in official statistics. In short, the potential credit …read more
Source: Goldman Warns "China Remains A Key Risk", Sees Yuan Downside Accelerating
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
By Tyler Durden
A few weeks ago we asked whether CalPERS would rely on sound financial judgement and math to set their rate of return expectations going forward or whether they would cave to political pressure to maintain artificially high return hurdles that they'll never meet but help to maintain their ponzi scheme a little longer (see “CalPERS Weighs Pros/Cons Of Setting Reasonable Return Targets Vs. Maintaining Ponzi Scheme“). The decision faced by CALPERS was whether their long-term assumed rate of return on assets should be lowered from the current 7.5% down to a more reasonable 6%. Well, we now have our answer and it seems the board erred on the side of maintaining the ponzi with a decision to reduce the fund's discount rate by only 50 bps, to 7%, to be phased in over 3 years.
Of course, this decision should come as little surprise to our readers as we concluded our previous post with the following prediction:
We've seen this battle between math/logic and politicians played out numerous times in states all across the country. Somehow we suspect that “math/logic” will continue to lose…better to bury your head in the sand for a couple of more years and pretend there is no problem.
Per The Sacramento Bee, the CalPERS board approved the discount rate adjustment with a vote of 6-1 and the reduction will be phased in over 3 years starting next July.
CalPERS moved to slash its official investment forecast Tuesday, a dramatic step that will translate into billions of dollars in higher annual pension contributions from the state, local governments and school districts.
Employees hired after January 2013, when a statewide pension reform law took effect, will also have to kick in more money. Older employees could see higher contributions, too, although that would be subject to contract bargaining.
CalPERS’ Finance and Administration Committee voted 6-1 to lower the forecast from 7.5 percent to 7 percent in phases over three years, starting next July. Although the committee’s vote must be ratified by the entire board Wednesday, most other board members indicated they support the move as well.
It would be the first adjustment to the forecast in four years.
The move is a recognition that investment returns are falling and that the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which is just 68 percent funded, needs higher contributions from government agencies to solve its long-term problems.
“We’re in a low-growth (investment) environment, and it’s expected to remain that way the next five to 10 years,” board member Henry Jones said.
While a 50bps decrease to a 7% discount rate will still trigger roughly $1 billion in incremental annual contributions from various California government entities according to Eric Stern of the California Department of Finance, it is still a long way from the fund's estimated returns of just 6.2% over the next decade which happens to match exactly their returns from the past decade.
Of course, mathematical realities have to be weighed against the risk of disrupting the ponzi scheme …read more
Source: CalPERS Board Votes To Maintain Ponzi Scheme With Only 50bps Reduction Of Discount Rate
Have we failed this generation of young adults by not equipping them to be able to handle the harsh realities of the real world? According to the Wall Street Journal, the percentage of Americans in the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket that are currently living with their parents hasn’t been this high in 75 years. At this point nearly 40 percent of our young adults in that age range are living at home, and many are concerned that this could have some alarming implications for the future of our nation.
In the United States today, more than 60 million people live in multi-generational households, and it is a good thing to have a tight family. But at some point young adults need to learn how to live their own independent lives, and in millions of cases this independence is being delayed or is never happening at all.
There are many factors involved in this trend. First of all, there is truly a lack of good jobs despite what we are being told about an “economic recovery”. Millions of young adults are graduating from college only to discover that there is a very limited number of good jobs available for our college graduates. So some college graduates are able to secure the types of jobs that they were hoping for, but millions of others are not.
Normally when a recession ends, the percentage of young adults living with their parents starts to go back down. But this has not happened this time around. Instead, the percentage of young adults that live at home has just continued to rise…
The trend runs counter to that of previous economic cycles, when after a recession-related spike, the number of younger Americans living with relatives declined as the economy improved.
The result is that there is far less demand for housing than would be expected for the millennial generation, now the largest in U.S. history. The number of adults under age 30 has increased by 5 million over the last decade, but the number of households for that age group grew by just 200,000 over the same period, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Another major factor in all of this is the fact that Americans are getting married later in life than ever before and they are having fewer kids than previous generations.
In the old days, people got married young and they set up their own households even if they were dirt poor. But these days we have hordes of single young adults that are perfectly content to sit at home and sponge off of Mommy and Daddy.
There seems to be a real lack of toughness to this generation of young adults, and many that have perceived this lack of toughness have resorted to referring to them as “Generation Snowflake”. Over the past 12 months this term has become so common that the Guardian has dubbed it “the defining insult of 2016″…
Until very recently, to call someone a snowflake would have involved the word …read more
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
The heads of Boeing and Lockheed Martin emerged from meetings with President-elect Trump vowing to rein in the costs of new Air Force Ones and the nation’s premier fighter jet. …read more
Source: Boeing vows to keep Air Force One costs below $4B
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Nadia Prupis via TheAntiMedia.org,
A Reuters investigation this week uncovered nearly 3,000 different communities across the U.S. with lead levels higher than those found in Flint, Michigan, which has been the center of an ongoing water contamination crisis since 2014.
click image for link to interactive map…
The investigation found that many of the hot-spots are receiving little attention or funding. Local healthcare advocates said they hope the reporting will spur action from influential community leaders.
All of the communities Reuters investigated had lead levels at least two times higher than Flint’s; more than 1,000 were four times higher. In most cases, the local data covered a 5- to 10-year period through 2015, the analysis states.
Areas affected by lead poisoning populate the map from Texas to Pennsylvania, reported Reuters‘ M.B. Pell and Joshua Schneyer. The available data charts 21 states that are home to about 61 percent of the U.S. population.
Despite the massive drop in lead poisoning rates since the 1970s—when heavy metals were phased out of paint and gasoline—many communities throughout the country are still at risk.
“The national mean doesn’t mean anything for a kid who lives in a place where the risks are much higher,” said Dr. Helen Egger, chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Child Study Center.
Like Flint, many of the communities are mired in “legacy lead,” Reuters reported—old industrial waste, crumbling paint, or corrosive pipes. But few have received help or attention.
Contamination in children can cause cognitive difficulties, which in turn can lead to low school performance, few job opportunities, and trouble with the law. That cycle was examined last year when 25-year-old Baltimore resident Freddie Gray died after his spine was severed in police custody. Amid protests against brutality and racism, many noted that Gray experienced lead poisoning as a child while living in an area with persistently high exposure levels.
But the problem is nationwide and affects a vast spectrum of communities, Reuters writes. Milwaukee, Wisconsin still has “135,000 prewar dwellings with lead paint, and 70,000 with lead water service lines,” and $50 million has already been spent to protect the city’s children. Many families do not have the funds to make the repairs themselves, and laws requiring owners to remove lead from their properties are not consistent state by state.
“Reporters visited several of the trouble spots: a neighborhood with many rundown homes in South Bend, Indiana; a rural mining town in Missouri’s Lead Belt; the economically depressed North Side of Milwaukee,” Pell and Schneyer write. “In each location, it was easy to find people whose lives have been impacted by lead exposure. While poverty remains a potent predictor of lead poisoning, the victims span the American spectrum—poor and rich, rural and urban, black and white.”
In St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the most contaminated neighborhoods included in the study, even a local pediatrician’s children had lead poisoning.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate approved a $170 million aid package to repair Flint’s corrosive pipes and fund recovery …read more
Source: Nearly 3,000 US Communities Have Lead Levels Higher Than Flint
By Tyler Durden
Three weeks ago we reported that in what may have been one of the most brazen thefts in Manhattan's jewelry district, a man brazenly swiped an 86-pound bucket full of gold worth $1.6 million from the back of an unattended Loomis armored truck on West 48th Street in the Diamond District on Sept. 29, in broad daylight, as tourists and locals were walking in and out of the jewelry stores that line the block.
The whole incident was caught on closed-circuit camera.
The suspect, decribed as 5 feet 6 inches tall, 150 pounds and in his 50s according to the police, managed to get away without a hitch. The police suspected that the unidentified man was lying low in Orlando or Miami until things blow over in the Big Apple.
Overnight the police not only identified the man, but according to their latest speculation, the gold thief has moved on from Florida, and is now to be found as far away from NY as possible.
On Tuesday, NYPD identified the man as Julio Nivelo. He is now believed to be in Los Angeles. NYPD Det. Martin Pastor says Nivelo, 53, is a convicted felon who's known to the NYPD as Luis Toledo, among other aliases. He's a career thief who's been arrested seven times and deported four times to his native Ecuador, according to Pastor.
Nivelo, a native of Ecuador, fled to Orlando, Fla., before heading to California, WNBC reported on Tuesday night. Mr. Nivelo, who was living in West New York, N.J., at the time of the theft, had previously been arrested seven times and deported four times, the station reported.
Surveillance video from the the theft showed Nivelo loitering around the truck before one guard goes to make a pickup, and the other guard heads to the front seat to grab his cellphone. Those 20 seconds were long enough for the thief to strike: he goes to grab the 86-pound bucket – roughly half his weight – and makes a run for it, though he clearly has difficulty maneuvering it. The video shows the thief setting down the heavy bucket, putting it on his shoulder, then taking a breather. He takes another few steps and pauses again. The normally 10-minute walk takes him an hour. He then jumps into a van at 49th Street and Third Avenue.
The police released several photos of Mr. Nivelo. Nivelo was a man about town before the heist, it appears: photos show him posing at Washington Square Park and with a figure of the pope at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.
Loomis has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction, police sources said.
Below is the NYPD post seeking the public's help in finding Nivelo… and the $1.6 million in gold that is supposedly in his vicinity.
* * *
WANTED: Burglary (Manhattan)
The suspect has been identified as follow:
************************************
The New York City Police Department is asking the public’s assistance identifying the individual depicted …read more
Source: Man Who Stole $1.6 Million Bucket Full Of Gold In Midtown Manhattan Has Been Identified
By Tyler Durden
7th day in a row of hope for Dow 20k…
It's a real cliffhanger…
Before we start – 2 WTF Charts of the day…
This is the stock is best in The Dow this year…
And this is the stock that is most responsible for The Dow's post-Trump surge…
That's the market you're buying ladies and gentlemen!
So, despite a massive monkey-hammering of VIX to a 10 handle at the opening, Dow 20,000 remains elusive…NOTE: Very odd action in VIX and The Dow today – super noisy. Dow's narrowest trading day since 2013.
Future show that overnight was quiet – pumped into the open then dumped when VIX ran out of steam… and an ugly close…
VIX puked to a 10-handle – its lowest since July 2014… (before that this is the lowest since March 2007) – note the last two times VIX droppped for 5 consecutive days was in July and October and was followed by a huge spike in vol.
The correlation between high- and low-beta stocks has collapsed to the lowest since the peak of the dotcom boom…
Despite red across all majors today, stocks remain green on the week, but the S&P is lagging (Small Caps best) – Trannies and Small Caps worst losers today…
Financials managed to hold green post-Fed but everything else is lower…
Volume has collapsed…
Bonds were bid again, pushing yields lower across the curve (lower on the week)…
The Dollar Index fell very modestly for the first time in 7 days…
Copper remains the week's biggest loser but crude (and silver) slipped notably on the day…
Ugly-ish day for crude – dropping on Libya production and an unexpected crude build…
Finally, we note that the turmoil in China/Hong Kong money markets has sent the Hang Seng to 13-year lows against The Dow – getting closed to support at parity…
Source: "Almost 20,000" Dow Disappoints For 7th Day In A Row Despite VIXtermination
By Tyler Durden
Another day, another shot across the bow from Donald Trump aimed squarely at China.
Having already participated (and in the case of one, precipitated) two mini diplomatic snafus with Beijing, Trump is sending a clear message to Beijing that US-China trade under his administration will be anything but business as usual, by creating a National Trade Council inside the White House to oversee industrial policy and has decided to appoint a hard core China hawk to run it.
According to the FT, which broke the news, Trump has chosen Peter Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist, to head the NTC. The author of books such as “Death by China” and “Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World” has for years warned that the US is engaged in an economic war with China and should adopt a more aggressive stance — a message that the president-elect sold to voters across the US during his campaign.
Speaking to the American public, Trump said “I read one of Peter’s books on America’s trade problems years ago and was impressed by the clarity of his arguments and thoroughness of his research,” Trump said. “He has presciently documented the harms inflicted by globalism on American workers, and laid out a path forward to restore our middle class.”
Fast forward to today, when Trump has made it clear that at least when it comes to the Chinese trade relationship, the president elect will engage in a wholesale overhaul of the legacy relationship. More details from the FT:
The Trump transition team described Mr Navarro as a “visionary economist” who would “develop trade policies that shrink our trade deficit, expand our growth, and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores”. His appointment is the second restructuring of trade policy that will see Mr Trump attempt to follow through on his focus to resurrect manufacturing, and create more industrial jobs, in the American economy.
The Trump team said the NTC would lead a “Buy America, Hire America” programme that would boost job creation in areas such as infrastructure and defence. It will work in tandem with three other offices in the White House: the National Security Council, the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council.
They added that it would mark the first time there was an office dedicated to manufacturing inside the White House, in a strong signal that Mr Trump plans to follow through on the promises that he made on the campaign trail.
While the Navarro appointment will certainly raise eyebrows, the move to create the new office is also likely to be seen as controversial by mainstream economists, many in the business community and pro-trade Republicans. Targeting the trade deficit is seen by many economists as likely to lead to protectionist trade policies. It may also be complicated by Mr Trump’s plans for an increase in spending and rising interest rates, both of which have already yielded a surge in the dollar that is likely to make US exports less competitive and …read more
Welcome to Esh Carmel Blog.
