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American foreign policy is becoming an unruly wild horse The era of American dominance is fading away. People like John Bolton, who like to reach for the language of war, are trying to force America to deal with its new problems by turning to out-of-date solutions. They fail to understand the major trends in global development, and they lack magnanimity and self-confidence in the face of the great changes of the times. They are burning through the strength, credit, and influence of the United States for no good reason, and risk leading American diplomacy into the abyss.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48377235CitarHuawei: China warns of investment blow to UK over 5G ban
Huawei: China warns of investment blow to UK over 5G ban
People are leaving these 10 states in the highest numbersWhile the reasons each state is dealing with an outbound migration crisis are different, there are several common themes, including high taxes, real estate prices and the cost of living.
Misunderstanding, lack of confidence behind 'China threat' illusionMartin Jacques, a senior fellow at Cambridge University, earlier told CGTN that there are two classic modes of Western expansion – military and political interventions. It is no surprise that Western countries regard China's BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) and other multi-win proposals as a political means to expand and even conquer other countries that the West used to control. It is not in China's genes to colonize disadvantaged states, and the West should be clear on that. Apart from the fundamental misunderstandings of China's model, a lack of confidence is another significant reason for the West's negative protrayal of China. China's rise in the past decades may have posed a threat to U.S. hegemony in the world, not the liberal international order. Losing its dominant status in the current international order is what the West fears the most.(...) Moreover, the U.S.-led alliance is seeing unprecedented challenges. Bearing a grudge against the capricious president's selfish "America First" policy, some of Washington's traditional allies are changing their previous hostile attitude towards China. This, combined with its economic slowdown, has made the U.S. more anxious about China's rise. In this context, the "China threat" theory has arisen and gained popularity.Despite the shift in attitudes among the debate's audience, a large number of Westerners still regard China as a threat. Time is needed to dispel ordinary Westerners' misunderstandings and prove that while the U.S. is tearing up international pacts, China is making concrete contributions to the liberal international order.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-10-states-people-are-moving-out-of-us-2019-5?IR=TCitarPeople are leaving these 10 states in the highest numbersWhile the reasons each state is dealing with an outbound migration crisis are different, there are several common themes, including high taxes, real estate prices and the cost of living.
Rogue chemical plants have been targeted in a Chinese government crackdown on the discharge of illegal gases.The authorities are believed to have launched a nationwide operation after it was revealed large amounts of ozone-depleting gases were being released in north-eastern China.The action includes arrests and the closure of at least two illicit facilities producing banned chemical CFC-11, used in the production of expanding foams for the building and insulation industries.“The government has followed up on the companies we identified in 2018,” said Clare Perry of EIA International, the environmental organisation which raised the alarm last year.“It has undertaken a nationwide enforcement effort, including raising the penalties for using CFC-11, and has shut down at least two CFC-11 production sites.”It was confirmed Wednesday by scientists reporting in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that industries in north-eastern China have spewed large quantities of CFC-11 into the atmosphere in violation of an international treaty.Since 2013, emissions have increased by about 7,000 tons yearly in the area, slowing the rate at which holes in the ozone layer are repairing themselves.“CFCs are the main culprit in depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects us from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation,” said lead author Matt Rigby, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Bristol.CFC-11 was used across the world in the 1970s and 1980s as a refrigerant and to make foam insulation.The 1987 Montreal Protocol banned CFCs and other industrial aerosols that chemically dissolve protective ozone six to 25 miles above the Earth’s surface, after holes were detected over Antarctica and Australia.Following the ban, global concentrations of CFC-11 declined steadily until about 2012. But last year scientists discovered the pace of that slowdown dropped by half from 2013 to 2017.Because the chemical does not occur in nature, the change could only have been produced by new emissions.Evidence pointed to east Asia, but could not nail down the exact origin.However, monitoring stations reported significant “spikes” in pollution when air arrived from industrialised areas in China.Although China has taken some action to crack down on firms illegally manufacturing CFC-11, closing down the practice will not be easy.CFC-11 is cheaper and more effective than alternatives and there are many thousands of firms making foams for China booming construction industry.“The most critical thing the government needs to do now is to track down and shut down all CFC-11 production, said Ms Perry.“This will involve high-priority large-scale sustained intelligence-led enforcement efforts on the part of China, something we have yet to see evidence of.”
The Bulls Continue To Bet On The FedThe "R" WordDespite hopes to the contrary, the U.S., and the globe, will experience another recession. The only question is the timing.
Blackstone calienta la venta de Fidere con una campaña de ofertas a derriboLa socimi, con activos valorados en más de 1.000 millones, ha lanzado una agresiva campaña para nuevos inquilinos, justo cuando ultima el diseño del proceso de venta del grueso de su cartera
An RV Camp Sprang Up Outside Google’s Headquarters. Now Mountain View Wants to Ban ItWith house prices out of reach, where will the van dwellers go?By Alistair BarrMay 21, 2019, 11:00 AM GMT+2In a quiet neighborhood near Google’s headquarters last month, rusty, oleaginous sewage was seeping from a parked RV onto the otherwise pristine street. Sergeant Wahed Magee, of the Mountain View Police Department, was furious.“You guys need to take care of it, like ASAP,” he said, lecturing the young couple living in the vehicle. “I’m not going to tow it today, but tomorrow if I come out here and it’s like this, it’s getting towed!” As he delivered the ultimatum, a self-driving car rolled past.A Waymo vehicle drives past RVs parked near Google headquarters.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergMountain View is a wealthy town that’s home to Alphabet Inc., the world’s fourth-most valuable public corporation and Google’s owner. Magee spends a lot of his time knocking on the doors of RVs parked on the city’s streets, logging license plates and marking rigs that haven’t moved for several days. This is the epicenter of a Silicon Valley tech boom that is minting millionaires but also fueling a homelessness crisis that the United Nations recently deemed a human rights violation. Thousands of people live in RVs across San Francisco and the broader Bay Area because they can’t afford to rent or buy homes. In December, Mountain View police logged almost 300 RVs that appeared to be used as primary residences. Palo Alto, Berkeley and other Bay Area towns have similar numbers. Some Silicon Valley towns have cracked down in recent months, creating an even more uncertain future for RV residents. At a March city council meeting, Mountain View voted to ban RVs from parking overnight on public streets. The ban hasn’t taken effect yet, but soon, the town’s van dwellers will need to go elsewhere. The city council also declared a shelter crisis and passed a new ordinance to ticket vehicles that “discharge domestic sewage on the public right of way.” At the meeting, some people opposing the ban blamed Google for the housing crisis. “In my neighborhood there are a group of five or six duplexes and a couple that I know lived in one of them for 22 years. When Google moved in next door, their landlord raised the rent by $700 a month,” said resident Susan Barkin. “Preventing parking and throwing more people out of our community is unconscionable. I do not want to live in a town where the only people who can afford to be here are very, very, rich techies or very, very, old retirees like myself.”If representatives from Google were in attendance, they didn’t speak up to defend the company or address the housing crisis.RVs parked near Google headquarters.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergBut the issue has arisen inside the Googleplex. At a staff meeting earlier this year, one Google worker asked why Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai was paid hundreds of millions of dollars, while some employees struggle to afford to live in the area. Pichai said it has little control over the high cost of living, people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg at the time. Silicon Valley's Van-DwellersThe median rent in Mountain View almost doubled since late 2010 to $4,151 a month. That’s nearly triple the national average, according to Trulia. The median home value is $1.8 million, up from $750,000 ten years ago, according to Zillow. “We have rising rents. We have gentrification. We have people being displaced,” said Jennifer Loving, head of Destination: Home, a group that’s trying to reduce homelessness in Santa Clara County, home to Google and Mountain View. “All of that together is creating an untenable situation for thousands and thousands of families and individuals who are trying to live and work here.”Mountainous ClimbHome prices in Google’s hometown have more than doubled since late 2010Source: ZillowAt first, it’s hard to spot RVs that are used as homes. But these vehicles are all over Silicon Valley. They line frontage roads that run alongside highways. There will often be a chain of them on quieter streets in office parks and light industrial areas. But they can also be found on suburban residential streets parked in rows opposite the ranch-style homes common to the area. The RVs are often white or beige, and the windows are covered with blinds, sheets or blankets for privacy. Leaves and dust sometimes accumulate on the windshield wipers, and some have generators on the back for extra power. Around Google’s campus there are sometimes multicolored company bikes parked nearby so RV dwellers can jump on and ride to work. Soon, these impromptu communities may be gone. Before that happens, Bloomberg spent the past month interviewing RV residents and speaking with officials and other locals about the phenomenon. A contract security employee for Google opens the door to her RV she lives in and rents for $800 a month in Mountain View.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergOne 24-year-old Google contract worker lives in a rented RV with her girlfriend close to the internet giant’s campus. She asked that her name not be published, because she didn’t want her employer to know about her living situation. She grew up in the Bay Area and served in the Navy for three years. After that, she studied psychology, then moved to Atlanta where she rented a townhouse for $1,050 a month.She applied online to be a Google security guard and when the contracting firm gave her the job, she moved to Mountain View in April. She initially considered renting a small apartment, but realized she couldn’t save any money that way. “An apartment out here would cost at least $2,500 a month,” she said. “The money I make here is great, but I would be pretty much spending the majority of that on rent and I just don’t want to do that.” So she decided to rent the RV for $800 a month.“There’s less space. That’s the main thing. It’s confined,” she said. Her day starts on Google’s campus where she can grab a quick breakfast, usually a banana. Lunch is also available at headquarters, while dinner is prepared on the RVs two stove tops. There’s no oven.Google’s Pricey BackyardRent in Mountain View, California, has almost doubled since late 2010Source: TruliaNote: Median estimated rents for all housing unitsComplaints from neighbors aren’t a problem because she’s parked the RV close to Google’s headquarters, which is all office parks with very few residential buildings. At night, she takes courses at the City College of San Francisco to become a firefighter. If she can get a job as a firefighter in San Francisco within a year, she'll continue to stay here, she said. “If not, I will take my earnings and go back to Georgia and purchase a home and live happily ever after. I can probably buy a house back there. It’s Georgia, it’s really cheap.”Another RV resident in Mountain View is a 41-year-old IT professional who now drives for Lyft Inc. He moved from Sacramento about two years ago after his wife got a job at a big drug-development company in Silicon Valley. (He asked not to be identified because he worries his wife might lose her job if her employer learns about her living situation.) Once they arrived, they realized they couldn’t afford to rent an apartment and build their savings, despite a combined income of roughly $100,000 a year.“We just did the math when we were, you know, renting a room, and we could kind of stay afloat but there’s no way to save any money for retirement or the future at all,” he said.The Lyft driver, and other van dwellers around him, said they aren’t sure what they’ll do when the parking ban kicks in, rendering their situation illegal. Many hope to just muddle through somehow. “I'm aware of the ban,” said Brandon, another Mountain View RV resident who didn’t want to share his last name. “I'll cross that particular bridge when I get to it.”Tech companies should be doing more to fix the housing crisis, the Lyft driver said. “There was a time when corporations were allowed to operate because they were also providing for the communities around them in some way,” he said. “And for some reason that responsibility has shifted to profits only.”A family cooks dinner in Rengstorff Park, across the street from their RV in Mountain View, California, on May 8, 2019.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergGoogle declined to comment, but referred to an interview one of the company’s public policy managers, Rebecca Prozan, gave to PBS in 2016. “Obviously, our footprint creates pressure. It creates pressure on housing and transportation, but that pressure isn’t just tech. It’s not just Google,” she said. “It’s all the industries that are creating the economy of the Bay Area. We all have to work together to figure out what we’re going to look like, and how we’re going to live.”When asked about employees living in RVs, she said: “We don’t necessarily want to comment on our employees participating in those activities.”Since 2014, Google has given more than $14 million to groups tackling homelessness in Mountain View. That includes $1 million for Destination: Home, and $1.5 million to help with construction of a 67-unit affordable housing development. It also has a plan to invest much more in a project to build thousands of homes on a nearby part of the city called North Bayshore. Twenty percent of that will be affordable housing, although it’s a long way from happening: Mountain View hasn’t decided how to proceed yet.A young boy fills a water bottle at Rengstorff Park across the street from his family’s RV in Mountain View.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergLoving, the head of Destination: Home, thinks the North Bayshore plan should include a lot more affordable housing. But she and others say it’s not just about money. There needs to be political will—people have to want to help their neighbors in need.Some Silicon Valley residents don’t want new apartment buildings changing their suburban towns, and they get angry at the thought of affordable housing bringing poorer people to their neighborhoods. Two years ago, about 500 local residents showed up at a meeting to discuss small, temporary housing in San Jose. Many screamed and shouted at Loving and her colleagues. At one point, the crowd chanted “build a wall” to keep homeless people away.Inside the van of a Google security guardPhotographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg“There have been meetings since where there’s a lot of fear about what these developments would look like, and fear is a really powerful emotion and it seems to supersede logic,” Loving said.Some cities are beginning to work more affordable housing into their expansion plans. And there’s a growing movement of residents who support, rather than fight, such development. But it’s nowhere near enough to fix the problem quickly. That’s a risk to Silicon Valley itself, because tech companies may go elsewhere. In February, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced a plan to spend $13 billion on new and expanded offices and data centers. A lot of this is outside Silicon Valley, where it’s cheaper to hire talent—in part because housing is more plentiful.There’s a second issue, too. If teachers, nurses, trash collectors and other regular workers can’t afford to live the area, the fabric of society begins to fray, according to Alison Hicks, a Mountain View council member who voted against the RV ban.“To have a regular functioning town you need to have occupational diversity,” she said. “You can't have a town that functions if we only have tech workers living in it … It won’t be a functioning city as I know it. It wouldn’t be a city I would want to live in.”A Google bicycle stands behind an RV parked on Landings Drive in Mountain View.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergBack on Mountain View’s streets, Magee followed up on the RV that was dripping with sewage. The following day, the owners had fixed the problem. When asked whether the RV situation will ultimately be resolved, Magee looked tired as he thought about the answer. After a 12-hour day, he had a long drive ahead to get home—he can’t afford to live in Mountain View.“The way things are going, I don’t see how it’s all gonna disappear,” he said. “Where are we gonna put everyone?”
Some Silicon Valley residents don’t want new apartment buildings changing their suburban towns, and they get angry at the thought of affordable housing bringing poorer people to their neighborhoods. Two years ago, about 500 local residents showed up at a meeting to discuss small, temporary housing in San Jose. Many screamed and shouted at Loving and her colleagues. At one point, the crowd chanted “build a wall” to keep homeless people away.
https://www.elconfidencial.com/empresas/2019-05-26/blackstone-venta-fidere-ofertas-derribo_2022478/CitarBlackstone calienta la venta de Fidere con una campaña de ofertas a derriboLa socimi, con activos valorados en más de 1.000 millones, ha lanzado una agresiva campaña para nuevos inquilinos, justo cuando ultima el diseño del proceso de venta del grueso de su cartera
La proliferación de autocaravanas junto la sede de Google en Mountain View...[...]
Cita de: Cadavre Exquis en Mayo 26, 2019, 20:51:13 pmLa proliferación de autocaravanas junto la sede de Google en Mountain View...[...]Pregunta idiota: ¿y no sería posible para una de ésas compañías que se hicieran no sólo con terrenos para sus oficinas, sino para construir viviendas para sus empleados?... Al fin y al cabo, ya se están planteando trasladarse a otros sitios por lo inalcanzable, aún para muchos de sus empleados, de vivir allí.