Electronic waste is a hazardous and difficult form of garbage to manage. Though a lot of e-waste can be recycled responsibly, many e-waste processors choose instead to ship it overseas for junkyards in poorer nations to deal with. Remarkably, exporting e-waste is perfectly legal in the US…but thanks to a scrappy nonprofit watchdog, some unscrupulous exporters are still going to jail. Here is a direct video link.
In one of his last interviews in October 2018, former Fed giant Paul Volcker warned that money was corrupting politics, policy, and so-called free markets, and that “better, stronger supervisory powers” are needed.
One area of interest is a trail of lucrative trades placed before statements and ‘official’ announcements are released to the public. Those closely watching markets note suspicious market activity on a near-daily basis. To date, there has been little investigation or regulatory response.
Vanity Fair highlights just a few examples in “There is Definite hanky-panky going on.” The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump chaos trades:
“…given how fishy and coincidental the trading in e-minis seems to be these days, the SEC or CFTC would be doing a great service (and their job) for the American people by investigating who is behind these lucrative trades, and what they knew before they placed them. At the moment, what we’re getting from them is an indifferent shrug.
Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion.”
Full-cost accounting of pollution and emissions are set to dramatically escalate the cost of air travel and pressure profits in the low-margin sector. Now, plane manufacturers and operators are seeing every reason to go electric. See Rolls-Royce thinks it can make a plane Greta Thunberg would fly in:
Rolls-Royce has partnerships with Airbus and other players to work on both hybrids and fully electric planes. Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies, is selling a more fuel-efficient engine technology now, while its parent company works on longer-range projects, spokesman John Thomas said.
Boeing, the biggest Airbus rival in the airplane field, is testing a line of small electric planes designed to do some of the jobs taxicabs do now. And General Electric’s airline-engine unit signed a deal in June with XTI Aircraft Company to use GE’s Catalyst engine as the core of a new hybrid-electric propulsion system for a planned XTI business aircraft.
Israel-based aviation start-up Eviation is working with partners including Siemens and Honeywell on a plane it calls Alice, an all-electric commuter aircraft for regional transport. Here is a direct video link.
