Archive

Archive for March 12, 2015

The Last, Great Run For The U.S. Dollar, The Death Of The Euro And 74 Trillion In Currency Derivatives At Risk

March 12, 2015 Comments off

theeconomiccollapseblog.com

 Dollars Euros - Public DomainAre we on the verge of an unprecedented global currency crisis?  On Tuesday, the euro briefly fell below $1.07 for the first time in almost a dozen years.  And the U.S. dollar continues to surge against almost every other major global currency.  The U.S. dollar index has now risen an astounding 23 percent in just the last eight months.  That is the fastest pace that the U.S. dollar has risen since 1981.  You might be tempted to think that a stronger U.S. dollar is good news, but it isn’t.  A strong U.S. dollar hurts U.S. exports, thus harming our economy.  In addition, a weak U.S. dollar has fueled tremendous expansion in emerging markets around the planet over the past decade or so.  When the dollar becomes a lot stronger, it becomes much more difficult for those countries to borrow more money and repay old debts.  In other words, the emerging market “boom” is about to become a bust.  Not only that, it is important to keep in mind that global financial institutions bet a tremendous amount of money on currency movements.  According to the Bank for International Settlements, 74 trillion dollars in derivatives are tied to the value of the U.S. dollar, the value of the euro and the value of other global currencies.  When currency rates start flying around all over the place, you can rest assured that someone out there is losing an enormous amount of money.  If this derivatives bubble ends up imploding, there won’t be enough money in the entire world to bail everyone out.

Do you remember what happened the last time the U.S. dollar went on a great run like this?

As you can see from the chart below, it was in mid-2008, and what followed was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression… Full Article Here

Categories: Economy Tags: , ,

Are you ‘over-connected’?

March 12, 2015 Comments off

bbc.com

(Josh Pulman)

(Josh Pulman)

Wander the city in 2015 and all you’ll see is people staring at screens or talking on handsets. Is it changing who we are? Tom Chatfield weighs up the arguments.

A group of people wait by a monument, unaware of each other’s existence. A woman strides open-mouthed down a busy street, holding one hand across her heart. Two young men – brothers? – stand behind a white fence, both their heads bowed at the same angle.

These are some of the moments captured in photographer Josh Pulman’s ongoing series called Somewhere Else, which documents people using mobile phones in public places (see pictures). Almost every street in every city across the world is packed with people doing this – something that didn’t exist a few decades ago. We have grown accustomed to the fact that shared physical space no longer means shared experience. Everywhere we go, we carry with us options far more enticing than the place and moment we happen to be standing within: access to friends, family, news, views, scandals, celebrity, work, leisure, information, rumour.

I’m pouring my hours not simply into a screen, but the most comprehensive network of human minds ever — So why do we feel the urge to ‘detox’?

Little wonder that we are transfixed; that  Full Article Here

Categories: Technology Tags: , ,

Earth-directed solar X-flare March 11

March 12, 2015 Comments off

earthsky.org

The sun has been relatively quiet, and this is the first X-flare of 2015. It caused a brief radio blackout at some frequencies. Possible aurora alert ahead.

The first X-flare of 2015 from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory

A strong Earth-directed X-flare erupted from a large active region on the sun – AR2297 – earlier today. The flare happened on March 11, 2015 at 16:22 UTC (11:22 a.m. CDT). It measured X2 on the Richter Scale of Flares. Spaceweather.com said:

Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the explosion ionized the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, causing HF radio fade-outs and other propagation effects on the dayside of our planet. In the red zone of this map, ham radio operators and mariners may have noticed brief but complete blackout conditions at frequencies below 10 MHz.

The disturbance has since subsided.

Spaceweather.com also said that natural radio emissions from the sun indicate a possible coronal mass ejection – CME – emerging from the blast site at speeds exceeding

Read more…

Categories: solar flare Tags: , , , ,

Rate Of Climate Change To Soar By 2020s, With Arctic Warming 1°F Per Decade

March 12, 2015 Comments off

thinkprogress.org

 “Rate Of Climate Change To Soar By 2020s, With Arctic Warming 1°F Per Decade“
heat

CREDIT: Shutterstock

New research from a major national lab projects that the rate of climate change, which has risen sharply in recent decades, will soar by the 2020s. This worrisome projection — which has implications for extreme weather, sea level rise, and permafrost melt — is consistent with several recent studies.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” finds that by 2020, human-caused warming will move the Earth’s climate system “into a regime in terms of multi-decadal rates of change that are unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years.”

In the best-case scenario PNNL modeled, with atmospheric carbon Read more…

Categories: Climate Change, Earth, Earth changes Tags: ,

American Millennials Are Some Of The World’s Least Skilled People, Study Finds

March 12, 2015 Comments off

huffingtonpost.com

MILLENNIALS
 We American Millennials are really, really good at using today’s technology.

That’s probably because we’ve forced companies to make technology that’s extremely easy to use, and that’s better at doing our day-to-day tasks than we are. But with easy power comes no responsibility, it seems. According to a new study, we’re some of the least skilled people in the world.

Fortune reports that Generation Y Americans (those born after 1980) lag behind their overseas peers in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. Researchers at the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS), who conducted the study, administered a

Read more…

Categories: studies, Study, United States Tags: , ,

Russia and North Korea forge ‘year of friendship’ pariah alliance

March 12, 2015 Comments off

theguardian.com

Neighbouring regimes declare closer co-operation as Kremlin’s role in Ukraine conflict and Kim Jong-un’s pursuit of nuclear weapons deeply rankle with west

 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been invited to Russia as part of the two countries' 'year of friendship'.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been invited to Russia as part of the two countries’ ‘year of friendship’. Photograph: KNS/AFP/Getty Images

Russia and North Korea have announced they will deepen economic and political ties under the banner of a “year of friendship” – a development that could further complicate the west’s attempts to deal with an increasingly belligerent Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un’s recalcitrant regime in Pyongyang.

The prospect of closer co-operation between Putin’s Kremlin and a pariah state with realistic nuclear ambitions will dismay the US, Britain and other countries hoping to pressure Pyongyang into ditching its ambitions to become a nuclear power, and to dissuade Russia from fuelling the

war in Ukraine.

North Korean state media said the two countries had agreed to make 2015 a “year of friendship” to mark the

Read more…

Categories: China, Russia Tags: , ,