Monday, November 2, 2015
GERMAN TOWN OF 100 GETS "ENRICHED" BY 750 MIGRANTS
German government officials have compelled a small town with just 102 people to take in approximately 750 migrants from Syria and other countries
German government officials have compelled a small town with just 102 people to take in approximately 750 migrants from Syria and other countries, The New York Times wrote Saturday.
Sumte, a small town at the western fringe of the former East Germany, was informed earlier this month by its municipal government that it had been assigned to accept over a thousand of the asylum seekers that have poured into Germany over the course of 2015. The number was so high that mayor Christian Fabel first thought it was a joke, but after a storm of local protest, the figure was lowered to 750, not out of sympathy but because it was believed a thousand would overwhelm the town’s sewage system.
The municipal government plans to house migrants inside an abandoned office building, but other than that, services for them will be scarce. Sumte has no school, no shops, and extremely limited public transportation options. Residents have expressed fears that the migrants, who are disproportionately young men, will bring a crime wave that will make it unsafe to go outside. Officials have responded by saying it will still be perfectly safe to go out at night, because the town’s streetlights will stay lit.
The Times’ write-up, by reporter Andrew Higgins, suggests the biggest problem for Sumte isn’t crime or other issues that could potentially arrive with the refugees, but rather the possibility that their arrival could make locals question the wisdom of nearly limitless immigration. The migrants, he says, have proved to be political boon for Holger Niemann, a member of the local council described as a neo-Nazi who seeks to preserve Germany’s “genetic heritage.”
Niemann’s anti-immigrant opinions are upsetting town members who say they are simply incompatible with democracy:
Reinhold Schlemmer, a former Communist who served as the mayor here before and immediately after the collapse of East Germany, said people like Mr. Niemann would “have been put in prison right away” during the Communist era.
“Now they can stand up and preach,” he said. “People say this is democracy, but I don’t think it is democracy to let Nazis say what they want.”
Thus far, though, the Times says that “tolerant values” in Sumte have won out: “When Mr. Niemann took the floor at a meeting in October between villagers and regional officials responsible for migrants,” the paper says, “Mr. Hammer snatched away the microphone.”
Credit to Infowars
German government officials have compelled a small town with just 102 people to take in approximately 750 migrants from Syria and other countries, The New York Times wrote Saturday.
Sumte, a small town at the western fringe of the former East Germany, was informed earlier this month by its municipal government that it had been assigned to accept over a thousand of the asylum seekers that have poured into Germany over the course of 2015. The number was so high that mayor Christian Fabel first thought it was a joke, but after a storm of local protest, the figure was lowered to 750, not out of sympathy but because it was believed a thousand would overwhelm the town’s sewage system.
The municipal government plans to house migrants inside an abandoned office building, but other than that, services for them will be scarce. Sumte has no school, no shops, and extremely limited public transportation options. Residents have expressed fears that the migrants, who are disproportionately young men, will bring a crime wave that will make it unsafe to go outside. Officials have responded by saying it will still be perfectly safe to go out at night, because the town’s streetlights will stay lit.
The Times’ write-up, by reporter Andrew Higgins, suggests the biggest problem for Sumte isn’t crime or other issues that could potentially arrive with the refugees, but rather the possibility that their arrival could make locals question the wisdom of nearly limitless immigration. The migrants, he says, have proved to be political boon for Holger Niemann, a member of the local council described as a neo-Nazi who seeks to preserve Germany’s “genetic heritage.”
Niemann’s anti-immigrant opinions are upsetting town members who say they are simply incompatible with democracy:
Reinhold Schlemmer, a former Communist who served as the mayor here before and immediately after the collapse of East Germany, said people like Mr. Niemann would “have been put in prison right away” during the Communist era.
“Now they can stand up and preach,” he said. “People say this is democracy, but I don’t think it is democracy to let Nazis say what they want.”
Thus far, though, the Times says that “tolerant values” in Sumte have won out: “When Mr. Niemann took the floor at a meeting in October between villagers and regional officials responsible for migrants,” the paper says, “Mr. Hammer snatched away the microphone.”
Credit to Infowars
Banks to start charging for cash deposits
(NaturalNews) Few could have envisioned it even just a few years ago, but it's happening now, and on an ever-widening scale. More big U.S. banks are shunning cash, because the banking system has become so dependent on other "assets" that large cash deposits actually pose a threat to their financial health, according to The Wall Street Journal.
State Street Corporation, a Boston-based institution that manages assets for institutional investors, has, for the first time, begun charging some customers for making large cash deposits, according to people familiar with the development.
And the largest U.S. bank in terms of assets — JP Morgan Chase & Co. — has dramatically cut "unwanted" deposits to the tune of $150 billion this year alone, in part by charging customers fees.
What gives? What kind of world do we live in when banks no longer want cash?
As the WSJ reported:
"The developments underscore a deepening conflict over cash. Many businesses have large sums on hand and opportunities to profitably invest it appear scarce. But banks don't want certain kinds of cash either, judging it costly to keep, and some are imposing fees after jawboning customers to move it."
As usual, the problem originated largely in Washington, D.C.
Criminalizing cash?
The paper said the banks' actions are being driven by low interest rates (set by the Fed) that eat into profits, as well as "regulations adopted since the financial crisis to gird banks against funding disruptions," adding in a separate report that a number of large financial institutions have become more dependent on buying and selling stocks, bonds and commodities like oil.The latest round of fees for large deposits stems from regulators' deeming them risky. They are sometimes dubbed hot-money deposits that analysts believe is likely to flee quickly in a crisis (think runs on Greek banks recently, which the government eventually curbed).
Agreed upon a year ago in September and managed by the Federal Reserve and other regulators, the rule covering liquidity coverage ratios forces banks and financial institutions to retain high-quality liquid assets — like central bank reserves and government debt — to cover anticipated deposit losses over a 30-day period (creative way for the federal government to continue financing its overspending — by forcing private banks now to hold government debt). Under the rules, banks are required to retain up to 40 percent against certain corporate deposits and as high as 100 percent against some hedge fund deposits, WSJ reported.
"At some point you wonder whether there will be a shortage of financial institutions willing to take on these balances," Kelli Moll, head of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP's hedge-fund practice in New York, told the paper.
Moll added that the subject of where to actually put cash has become something of an interesting conversation as hedge funds are turned away by the traditional banking sector.
Dodd-Frank is to the financial industry what Obamacare is to health care
WSJ further explained the phenomenon and fallout:"Jerome Schneider, head of Pacific Investment Management Co.'s short-term and funding desk, which advises corporate and institutional clients, said that as a result of the bank actions, he and his customers have discussed as cash alternatives boosting investments in U.S. Treasury bonds, ultrashort-duration bond funds and money-market funds."
"Clients have been put on warning," Schneider said, when it comes to cash.
The rules essentially criminalizing large depositors of cash stem from the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial "reform" law — a "reform" that did to the banking industry what Obamacare has done to the health care industry.
The law's two primary authors — Democrats Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, both of whom are now out of Congress — were also backers of Clinton-era housing rules said by experts to have caused the 2008 financial crisis. So, in essence, Dodd-Frank is punishing banks for rules that the two of them (along with most other Democrats and too many Republicans — and Bill Clinton's signature on the legislation) actually caused.
In the meantime, there appears to be no end to the federal government's meddling in both the financial industry and just about every other facet of American life.
Causing more problems than it solves — that's a classic congressional move.
Credit to Natural News
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/051762_cash_deposits_criminalization_banking_regulations.html#ixzz3qG9BihFh
Robots Can Now Teach Each Other New Tricks
A robot at Brown University learned how to perform a task from a very different robot at Cornell University.
WHY IT MATTERS
If robots can learn from one another, they could gain new capabilities more quickly and adapt to unfamiliar situations.
The ability to acquire and then share knowledge is a central component of human culture and civilization. A small milestone in the exchange of robot knowledge has now been demonstrated by two bots working in different academic research labs.
Researchers at Cornell University previously devised an online game, called TellMeDave, through which volunteers can help train a robot to perform a task and associate different actions with commands given in everyday language. By guiding the robot through a task, a volunteer trains a machine-learning algorithm so the robot can perform the task again. And this learned behavior is stored in a central repository called RoboBrain that’s accessible by other robots (see “The World’s First Knowledge Engine for Robots”).
Some time ago, through this platform, a type of research robot called PR2 had been taught to perform a number of a simple demonstration tasks, including picking up several mugs from a table and placing them on top of upturned bowls. Several hundred miles away, in a lab at Brown University, a different type of robot, called Baxter, has taken what PR2 had learned and used it to figure out how to perform the same task in a different setting.
The work is part of an effort to figure out how robots might share information in useful ways. That could reduce the need for meticulous reprogramming, and it could allow robots to adapt to quickly when faced with a new task or an unfamiliar setting.
“It’s pointing in an interesting direction,” says Stefanie Tellex, an assistant professor at Brown University, whose group enabled the Baxter robot to learn. “When you put a robot in a new situation—and in the real world it happens in every room the robot goes into—you somehow want that same robot to engage in autonomous behaviors.”
Speaking last week at the Bay Area Robotics Symposium, held at the University of California, Berkeley, Ashutosh Saxena, who led the development of TellMeDave and RoboBrain, said that robots will increasingly share information in the future. “We are trying to make robots to learn and share knowledge,” he said. “Different robots can push and pull knowledge from the [RoboBrain] database.”
The key challenge in transferring learning between the robots at Cornell and Brown was that they are physically completely different, which means that low-level commands, such as those specifying the position each joint needs to assume in order to reach for a mug, will not match. Tellex’s group had to figure out a scheme that would allow commands to be transferred between the two platforms.
Ultimately, she says, it would be ideal for a robot to figure out how to translate information for itself, based on how its physical body compares with that of another robot. “This is what we’d all like to do, and this is really a baby step toward that vision,” Tellex says. “There are a lot of remaining technical challenges.”
Nick Roy, a professor at MIT’s CSAIL says many researchers, including several at MIT, are interested in enabling robots to share knowledge. One thing making it possible, he says, is increased bandwidth and cloud computing capacity: “As we’ve gotten the ability to handle more and more data across the Internet, it’s become more feasible to have this kind of shared [knowledge] representation. It’s something that the robots community has long aspired to.”
Credit to Will Knight
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542821/robots-can-now-teach-each-other-new-tricks/
Dead comet with skull face to hurtle by Earth on Halloween
Miami (AFP) - A massive space rock that will shave by Earth on Halloween looks like a dead comet with a skull face, NASA said after gaining a closer look at the spooky space object.
Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145.
But using the US space agency's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts "have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday.
Scientists have also spotted an eerie skull-like resemblance on the face of the rock, based on radar data from the National Science Foundation's 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145.
But using the US space agency's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts "have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday.
Scientists have also spotted an eerie skull-like resemblance on the face of the rock, based on radar data from the National Science Foundation's 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
"In the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby," said Kelly Fast, IRTF program scientist at NASA and acting program manager for the US space agency's Near-Earth Object Observations Program.
The space rock has already grabbed attention with its unusually high speed and big size, about as large as a football stadium at 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter.
Credit to Yahoo news
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Massive 'crack in the Earth' opens up suddenly in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains
The crack appears like a miniature Grand Canyon up close. (Photo: Randy Becker/Facebook)
A dramatic crack has suddenly formed in the foothills of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains that measures an impressive 750 yards long and 50 yards wide. It was discovered recently by surprised backcountry hunters who travel frequently to the area in search of game.
First reported by SNS Outfitter & Guides, a hunting company, on their Facebook page, the mammoth chasm appeared over the course of just a couple of weeks. It's an impressive example of just how quickly very large geological events can occur under the right conditions.
"Everyone here is calling it ‘the gash.’ It’s a really incredible sight,” wrote SNS on the group's Facebook page.
"An awesome example of how our earth is not as stable as you might think. Awesome forces at work here to move this much dirt!!” added Randy Becker, one of the hunters to stumble upon "the gash." Becker shared a number of stunning photographs of the crack to his own Facebook page.
A shot taken from a distance and posted at SNS gives some perspective about just how wide and how deep the crack is:
A dramatic crack has suddenly formed in the foothills of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains that measures an impressive 750 yards long and 50 yards wide. It was discovered recently by surprised backcountry hunters who travel frequently to the area in search of game.
First reported by SNS Outfitter & Guides, a hunting company, on their Facebook page, the mammoth chasm appeared over the course of just a couple of weeks. It's an impressive example of just how quickly very large geological events can occur under the right conditions.
"Everyone here is calling it ‘the gash.’ It’s a really incredible sight,” wrote SNS on the group's Facebook page.
"An awesome example of how our earth is not as stable as you might think. Awesome forces at work here to move this much dirt!!” added Randy Becker, one of the hunters to stumble upon "the gash." Becker shared a number of stunning photographs of the crack to his own Facebook page.
A shot taken from a distance and posted at SNS gives some perspective about just how wide and how deep the crack is:
"The Gash" seen from a distance. (Photo: SNS Outfitter & Guides/Facebook)
Credit to mnn.com
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/massive-crack-earth-opens-suddenly-wyomings-bighorn-mountains
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