Juggling Dynamite

This clip offers a good summary of the myriad of pressures hitting global bank revenues and balance sheets today. QE programs between 2009-14, helped to paper over problems long enough for banks to enable more bad debt and reckless risk in the financial system; for some executives to cash out (for people like Goldman’s Blankfein and JP Morgan’s Dimon to become billionaires), but it was always a short-term stall rather than a fix…

Raoul Pal, Global Macro Investor Publisher, explains his concern over European banks and lists his troubled bank list.
Here is a direct video link.

We humans can be so smart and resourceful when we chose to learn and evolve.

New Yorker Doug Manowitz built an electric vehicle from parts that he mostly ordered online. His goal was to build a zero-emission vehicle he could use to to zip around the city. Here is a direct video link.

And for all those festering over ‘range anxiety’, understand that the roads themselves are obvious solar receptors that can fuel electric vehicles and the grid itself. See: France is using 600 miles of roads to generate renewable energy.

The panels use polycrystalline silicon to trap sunlight, and according to Colas, they can be used on any road. They can reportedly support a variety of vehicular traffic and don’t need any special engineering — they can be installed right top of the road.

While the project is certainly forward-thinking, it’s not the first of its kind. In November 2014, the Netherlands opened the world’s first solar bikeway; as Mic’s Tom McKay reported in May, the project was a major success.

Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, water consumption and pollution, is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry, and is a primary driver of rainforest destruction, species extinction, habitat loss, topsoil erosion, ocean “dead zones,” and virtually every other environmental ill. Yet it goes on, almost entirely unchallenged.  Here is a direct video link.