Saturday, January 20, 2018

California's bullet train (and biggest boondoggle) is over budget by billions - Fox News

19/1/2018
California's bullet train (and biggest boondoggle) is over budget by billions
Barnini Chakraborty By Barnini Chakraborty | Fox News
Billion-dollar cost hike for California bullet train
New reports reveal California's bullet train construction project is costing $2.8 billion more than anticipated. What's happening now and what it could mean in the future.
It’s billions of dollars over budget and seven years behind schedule, and appears to have no plausible way of living up to its goal of getting riders across the state in three hours or less.
Welcome to what’s arguably the nation’s largest infrastructure project and California’s biggest boondoggle.
The highly hyped bullet train has been a challenge from the start. No one thought it would be technically, financially and politically easy, but the way the project has been mishandled has some Californians fed up and demanding answers.
Just this week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the organization charged with overseeing construction, reported that the cost of the first segment had dramatically risen – again.
“The worst-case scenario has happened,” admitted Roy Hill, lead consultant on the project.
Since its start, this hot-mess express of a project has been plagued by delays and has blown through every single budget estimate imaginable. And it’ll likely cost the state and taxpayers more in the coming months and years.
Much more.
“The so-called bullet train is a solution in search of a problem that is plagued by billions of dollars in cost overruns and fiscal mismanagement,” San Diego City Councilman Mark Kersey told Fox News. “The billions being wasted on this boondoggle could have been invested in our current infrastructure needs, such as water storage, flood control, highways and bridges.”
This week’s updated cost estimate -- to complete just the first phase - a 119-mile segment in the Central Valley - has ballooned to $10.6 billion. That’s a jaw-dropping 77 percent increase from initial estimates, 36 percent higher than forecasts from a year ago.
When California voters in 2008 narrowly approved $10 billion in bond as seed money for the high-speed rail development, they were told the total cost would be about $43 billion.
Fresh estimates put it now at $67 billion.
Brian Kelly, head of the State Transportation Agency, was appointed this week to run the High-Speed Rail Authority. He told The New York Times that even though the project has “mammoth opposition,” he has “never seen a single project that would have such a transformative impact as this one.”
Other supporters reason that the project should continue because billions of dollars have already been spent.
Critics, however, say the state should cut its losses and call it a day.
“The money is already wasted. There’s no way to unwaste it,” James Moore, director of the transportation engineering program at the University of Southern California, told Fox News.
He added that Californians have only “scratched the surface” when it comes to expenses, and said that estimates were “overtly deceptive.”
He described ridership forecasts as “fictional” and said the idea behind the state bullet train lacks logic.
“If you build a mode that is slower than an aircraft and costlier than gas, people aren’t going to ride it,” he said.
Kersey agrees.
“It’s far from certain that Californians would even utilize the proposed high-speed rail given the ease of air travel among California’s major cities,” he said. “It’s so easy to get in an airplane and fly anywhere you want to, (to) any of the big cities around the state.”
He also said that by the time the train is up and running – sometime around 2025 - it will be outdated.
“The ‘high-speed’ rail debacle is the technology of yesteryear and has no feasible plan for success,” he said, adding that Californians shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for “pet projects for politicians.”
The four leading Democratic candidates for governor in California have offered various levels of support for the rail project.
The Los Angeles Times says current Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom -- the frontrunner in the gubernatorial race -- has dodged repeated requests for interviews on the bullet train for more than two years.
Newsom’s office also did not return multiple calls from Fox News seeking comment.
“This reticence to speak about a deeply troubled project might seem like smart political strategy, given its support by the governor and construction trade unions, a valued Democratic constituency,” The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote in a scathing editorial. “If the Democratic candidates don’t detail how they would salvage the most expensive public project in California history, there’s a better adjective: cowardly.”
Last February, California’s House asked the administration to block a pending federal grant until an audit of the project’s finances is completed.
The letter was signed by all 14 members of the state’s Republican delegation and was sent to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
As of now, there's been no movement on the request.



http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/19/californias-bullet-train-and-biggest-boondoggle-overbudget-by-billions.html

Mike Pence visits Middle East but US role as peace broker may be over - Guardian


Mike Pence visits Middle East but US role as peace broker may be over
Under Trump, relations between the Palestinian leadership and Washington have soured – and Pence’s trip is expected to confirm the enmity
Oliver Holmes in Jerusalem
Sat 20 Jan 2018 21.04 AEDT Last modified on Sat 20 Jan 2018 21.06 AEDT
Pence, an evangelical Christian, has visited Israel four times before and pushed for Trump’s inflammatory policies in the Middle East.
It’s not the trip to the Holy Land that Mike Pence might have imagined. For a start, the US vice-president – an evangelical Christian – is no longer welcome in Jesus’s birthplace of Bethlehem.
Donald Trump doomed Pence’s chances of a visit to the West Bank when he reversed decades of US policy last month by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This broke a longstanding international consensus that the issue would be negotiated in peace talks with the Palestinians, who also claim parts of the city.
While Trump did not rule out a future division of Jerusalem, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, swiftly rescinded Pence’s invitation to meet him and visit Bethlehem, while senior Christian clerics in Egypt – where Pence arrives on Saturday at the start of his four-day trip ­– also cancelled planned events.
Why Trump’s funding threat to Palestinians is even more dangerous than Jerusalem move
Read more
Since then, relations between the Palestinian leadership and Washington further soured this week after the US administration froze $65m in aid money for the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees. The cut has placed UNRWA in the most severe funding crisis of its seven-decade history.
Trump has said he wants to revitalise long-stalled peace talks in pursuit of what he has described as the “ultimate deal”. Yet when Pence touches down in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, the US’s role as mediator in the conflict may be over for good.
Palestinian leaders say that the US can no longer act as an honest peace broker; last weekend, Abbas denounced Trump’s actions as the “slap of the century”.
Recent statements from the vice-president’s office have not even mentioned peace talks, saying instead that the trip will focus on security issues.
Press secretary Alyssa Farah said Pence – who will also meet the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi on Saturday and Jordan’s King Abdullah on Sunday – will “discuss ways to work together to fight terrorism and improve our national security”.
Next week, the former congressman and governor of Indiana will hold meetings with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and deliver an address to the country’s parliament, the Knesset. He will visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall, the holiest Jewish site where worshippers can pray.
In Jerusalem, signs can been seen welcoming Pence as a “true friend” of Israel.
The ancient city – home to major Muslim, Christian and Jewish sites – was captured in the 1967 six-day war by Israel, which claims it as an “eternal and undivided” capital. Palestinians claim Jerusalem’s eastern sector, which includes the walled old city – an area they hope will be the capital of their future state.
Pence has visited Israel four times before and pushed for Trump’s inflammatory policies in the Middle East, standing next to the president when he made the recent announcement about Jerusalem.
Pence criticised Barack Obama in 2010 for not taking sides in the conflict.
“America’s on the side of Israel,” Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “And to send any other message than our unwavering support, that we will stand with what the sovereign government and the people of Israel decide is in their interest, I think represents a departure from where the heart of the American people are at.”
In Congress, Pence pushed to limit US aid to the Palestinian Authority and is a vocal advocate of the separation wall Israel has built. He has remained popular with evangelical voters in the US.
Trump has tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner with spearheading a fresh peace initiative, although details of that effort remain scant.
On Wednesday, Abbas said: “Jerusalem will be a gate for peace only if it is Palestine’s capital, and it will be a gate of war, fear and the absence of security and stability – God forbid – if it is not,” he said.
“It’s the gate for peace and war and President Trump must choose between the two.”

The Mysterious Twitter User Drawing a Swarm of Japan Traders - Bloomberg

The Mysterious Twitter User Drawing a Swarm of Japan Traders
By Shoko Oda
January 15, 2018, 3:00 AM GMT+11 Updated on January 15, 2018, 4:24 PM GMT+11
Tweets by the anonymous Okasanman are ‘crucial’ for traders
Prolific tweeter has more followers than the Bank of Japan
The Mysterious Twitter User Attracting a Swarm of Japan Traders
Bloomberg’s Shoko Oda reports on a Twitter user who is attracting a swarm of Japan traders.
On a day when billions in profits and losses would be determined by split-second trades, the salaried professionals of Japan’s financial markets were glued to their news terminals. Another group was staring at the feed of an anonymous Twitter account.
It was shortly after noon on Jan. 29, 2016, and people with money at stake were waiting for the Bank of Japan to announce its monetary policy. While the decision’s date is set in advance, nobody knows its timing.
Okasanman’s Twitter account.Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg
“It’s a negative interest rate bazooka!” wrote the Twitter user who goes by the handle Okasanman, attaching a screenshot of an article just published on a local news website, showing the BOJ was discussing introducing minus rates as its latest shock-and-awe stimulus weapon.
As stock futures jumped and the yen tumbled, some traders expressed gratitude for the warning. About 15 minutes later, the bank said it was taking borrowing costs below zero.
“This post saved my life," one user gushed in reply. “The profits I made are thanks to it.”
‘Locust Lord’
Okasanman has been dubbed a “locust lord” because the account attracts a swarm of traders who seek to profit from the prolific tweets on everything from global economic data releases to the latest twists in developing political situations. While the account only points to already available information, the speed at which it does -- and the breadth of its coverage -- has built a following that’s larger than that of the BOJ.
"How is it so fast?" asked Hajime Sakai, chief fund manager at Mito Securities Co. in Tokyo, where he helps oversee $594 million. "I’m very curious to know."
Okasanman’s identity and motivation for spending hours every day providing information to more than 146,000 followers -- as of the time of publication -- for free are a mystery. The person or people behind the handle didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the account is another example of how microbloggers -- from anonymous short sellers to market commentators such as Zerohedge -- are becoming a feature of how information is transmitted through modern financial markets.
Vast Coverage
The Okasanman account scavenges through a huge range of sources, at all hours, to find potentially market-moving news. That includes newspapers and magazines, financial data providers, disclosures to the stock exchange, and tweets on accidents or fires. Many appear to be automated, though manually written commentary shows a love of groan-worthy puns and occasionally crude content.
In August, the account was among the first to tweet an exclusive report by a local magazine, not normally known for its market-moving scoops, that pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca Plc had made an unsuccessful takeover bid for Japanese drug company Daiichi Sankyo Co. -- and that a purchase was still possible. Daiichi Sankyo shares surged the most in nine years.
“His tweets are absolutely crucial," said Naoki Murakami, a prominent day trader with more than 38,000 followers himself.
On any given day, the tweeting is relentless. On Dec. 20, the account sent 111 tweets, starting 12:44 a.m. and ending at 11:46 p.m. Cryptocurrencies: 33 tweets. The U.S. Senate vote on the tax bill: 3. Other topics included a disgraced sumo wrestler, a report on North Korean ICBM tests, and the latest Pokemon movie.
Okasanman “must have researched what sources have been fastest over the years” for given topics, said Katsuhiro Yoneshige, founder and chief executive officer of JX Press Corp., which develops apps that source breaking news from social media posts. “It’s probably not something you can build in a day.”
Little is known about Okasanman. There’s the profile picture: a cartoon man in a yellow safety helmet. There’s the profile description. Work: IT-related, investor, day trader. Interests: music (Japanese singers and bands), movies (cult and science fiction), psychology and languages (English and Finnish). “Live market commentary from 12:30 p.m. to 3:10 p.m. every weekday,” it says. “A pretext for a gag-fest.”
And that’s it, apart from the occasional hint among the tweets. Okasanman seems to live in an unfashionable residential area just outside Tokyo and appears to own a cat. But is it a man or woman? And is it run by a single person, or multiple Okasanmen?
Dad Jokes
"I think he might be a bit older," says Yoneshige, who at 29 says some of Okasanman’s cultural references are from before his time. The language used, as well as a taste for dad jokes and an obsession with Ivanka Trump, would seem to point to a middle-aged man, but Bloomberg News was unable to speak with anyone who could confirm who Okasanman is. The first autocomplete suggestion in a Google search for Okasanman is "identity.”
The only interaction Bloomberg News was able to secure with him for this article was when it was published. Following its release, he retweeted the story in typical dissembling style. "Even if you follow this account, only your puns will improve," he joked, referring to his own account.
Okasan Securities Group Inc., a mid-tier Japanese brokerage house, says it has nothing to do with the account.
The motives are also unclear: why go to so much effort to provide the information for free? There seems to be no attempt to monetize the feed, or tweets that might be supplied by sponsors.
Not everyone is that impressed. "I’ve never really imagined what he could be like," says perhaps Japan’s most-famous tweeting day trader, who goes by the handle Cis. "He tweets news really fast. That’s my only impression."
But one thing is certain: Okasanman’s influence has grown so much that the account can cause confusion when it indulges in the occasional prank, such as a tweet in November 2016.
“Kuroda to hold emergency press conference on resignation,” it said.
Coming after almost a year of criticism of the Bank of Japan’s negative rate policy, many followers took this to be a reference to BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda. Two minutes later, Okasanman clarified: It was Hiroki Kuroda, former pitcher for the baseball team Hiroshima Carp.
— With assistance by Min Jeong Lee, Stephen Stapczynski, and Jason Clenfield

A Prime Number Could Be the Answer to Bitcoin’s Power Problem - Bloomberg

A Prime Number Could Be the Answer to Bitcoin’s Power Problem
By Jonathan Tirone
January 11, 2018, 4:00 PM GMT+11 Updated on January 12, 2018, 1:24 AM GMT+11
Real-world problems can also be solved through crypto mining
Cryptocurrencies challenged to put electricity to better use
Why China Is Cracking Down on Cryptocurrencies
Methods used by computers programmed to run a 350-year-old equation may also offer answers to bitcoin’s out-sized demand for electricity.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search found and confirmed the biggest known prime number, a 23-million-digit-long figure discovered with the math of 16th century French monk Marin Mersenne, according to a statement earlier this month. That effort, along with other collaborative computing methods, are advancing the science of cryptography, which is essential to creating and tracking bitcoins.
“These ideas could be seen as intellectually connected,” said Seth Schoen, a senior technologist at San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is offering a $150,000 bounty to the first person or group to discover a 100-million digit prime number. “Cryptocurrency mining could be seen as an indirect descendant of distributed computing projects.”
The process of searching for prime numbers -- which are at the foundation of cryptography -- shows how solving tedious equations can lead to scientific breakthroughs that have practical applications.
Prime Number Mining
Size of known primes up 50-fold since networked computers began searching
Source: Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
The meteoric rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is stirring debate at the highest levels of monetary policy making. Adherents are betting that trust in its blockchain technology for tracking transactions will eventually revolutionize how value is stored and transmitted. Detractors point to the massive energy consumed by the computers that are used to solve the mundane mathematical equations that keep the system going.
Energy has always been part of bitcoin’s DNA. The person credited with creating the currency, identified only as Satoshi Nakamoto, devised the system that awards virtual coins for solving complex puzzles and uses an encrypted digital ledger to track all the work and every transaction.
Bounty hunters for prime numbers and cryptography hacker groups have helped to improve cryptocurrencies by showing people how to collectively compute problems in a distributed way, Schoen said. Bitcoin is an “odd fit” in this tradition because the math problems it solves aren’t particularly “useful or interesting for anything” outside its system.
“This energy is put to a productive use in one sense -- confirming the authenticity of bitcoin transactions,” Schoen wrote in an email. “Yet it seems disproportionate in many ways, particularly if another technical alternative could be found for confirming transactions while using much less energy.”
Quantum Computing
The EFF technologist, active in encryption for more than 20 years, emphasized that it’s the collaborative methods used in detecting very large prime numbers rather than the figures themselves that have the biggest impact on cryptography. Until the advent of quantum computing, most people are safe with three-digit encryption, he said.
A search for compromise is accelerating. Some researchers are trying to lower the energy needed for computer processing. Others have been tying cryptocurrency mining to math that solves real-world problems.
One example is gridcoin, a cryptocurrency mined by a global network of more than 23,000 computers that are connected with scientists at the University of California at Berkeley. Gridcoins are awarded in return for joining the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC. That work “may lead to advances in medicine, biology, mathematics, science, climatology, particle and astrophysics,” according to the group’s website, which notes that the energy needed to mine gridcoin is a fraction of what bitcoin requires.
Gridcoin Up Sixfold Since October
Cryptocurrency tied to solving real-world math problems for science and medicine
Source: Cryptocompare.com
Another emerging cryptocurrency field uses so-called proof-of-space algorithms. Those could cap the amount of energy needed for mining and maintenance, according to Schoen. Any new alternative still will struggle to overcome bitcoin’s advantage as first-mover among digital currencies.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search itself is an example of how collaborative networks programmed to run mundane equations can also be tuned to solve real-world problems. The Mersenne Prime Search software also doubles as a monitor making sure that participants’ computer systems are running properly and alerting them if something goes wrong, founder George Woltman wrote in an email.
“It’s clearer to see how the existence of bitcoin is making people better off,” Schoen said. “But it would definitely be interesting to see if cryptocurrencies in the future can align interests better by using proof-of-work problems with side effects that help solve other problems.”

What are the odds of Trump surviving 2018 in office? - Independent

19/1/2018
What are the odds of Trump surviving 2018 in office?
The market thinks that the threats to Trump's presidency are many – the Mueller investigation, rumours of early stage dementia, former staffers with axes to grind, the list goes on
Christoph Siemroth
Stephen Bannon thinks Trump has a 33.3 per cent chance of making it to January 2021 AP
Donald Trump has been under constant fire from critics since he began his campaign in the summer of 2015, and his presidency has so far been perhaps the most chaotic and bizarre in recent decades. But as he approaches the first anniversary of his inauguration, the pressure is only getting more intense.
First came the revelations in the bestseller Fire and Fury, which reports on various White House aides’ concerns about the president’s mental capacity. Then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s request to question Trump about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, and his decision to subpoena the president’s ostracised former ally, Steve Bannon.
So as Trump celebrates a year since his inauguration, what are the chances he’ll still be president when 2018 is over?
Trump's First Year: Who has been and gone from the White House?
There are plenty of guesses and estimates out there, informed and otherwise. Bannon for one is quoted in Fire and Fury as saying Trump only has a 33.3 per cent chance of making it to the end of his term in January 2021. But while many experts and insiders have opinions on the matter, when it comes to forecasting future events, betting and prediction markets have been shown to be rather more reliable.
A prediction market is a simple financial market that allows everyone to bet on an uncertain future outcome. The market most interesting for us asks: “Will Donald Trump be president at year-end 2018?” The yes-asset will pay 100 cents if Trump is still in office at midnight December 31, 2018, and 0 cents if he is not. Because an asset is worth at most 100 cents and at least 0 cents, the asset price is between 0 and 100 – just like a probability.
Since anyone can trade in these markets and adjust the prices, prediction markets have been characterised as a market-based form of the wisdom of the crowd. If the crowd thinks the asset is underpriced – that is, that the implied probability is too low – then people can buy the asset at an expected profit and thereby adjust the price upwards. If the asset is seen as overpriced, then traders can sell to bring the price down.
And indeed, research shows that the prices in these markets are a good predictor of the probabilities. Whenever the asset price is 60 cents, then in 60 per cent of the cases the underlying outcome does in fact happen. If the price is 70 cents, then the underlying outcome happens in 70 per cent of the cases, and so on. That means prices are “well calibrated”; on average, they correspond to probabilities.
Donald Trump's first year: in pictures
Another study finds that assets set to expire more than half a year in the future can exhibit slight biases. Prices above 50 cents tend to be slightly larger than the true probabilities – so looking at the odds on Trump’s future, it’s important to regard the prices as optimistic estimates.
What the crowd says
Currently, the yes-asset trades at 77 cents, implying a 77 per cent or less probability that Trump survives 2018 in office. So the market thinks that while the threats to his presidency are many – the Mueller investigation, rumours of early stage dementia, former staffers with axes to grind – Trump is considerably more likely to survive than be ousted.
Still, of the 57 US presidential terms served prior to Trump, only nine ended prematurely, meaning 84 per cent of terms were fulfilled. The market expectation of Trump making it through the next year (not even the entire term) is therefore significantly below this historical average.
Another market asks: Will Trump be president at year-end 2019? Certainly the probability must be lower here, since Trump cannot resume office in 2019 if ousted in 2018. And indeed, the yes-asset in this market is currently trading at 62 cents, indicating only a 62 per cent probability or less that Trump survives the next two years in office.
But despite the shockwaves generated by Fire and Fury, the prices in both markets have not changed much in the ensuing weeks. Indeed, if anything, they went slightly up around the book’s release, only to revert again a few days later. It seems the markets may have considered the book’s “revelations” just another episode of Trump melodrama.
However, while the odds didn’t change much, the trading volume (i.e. the number of assets bought and sold) started to explode on January 1, around the time newspapers first started discussing the book. These numbers indicate that, while the book did create a lot of interest, it did not considerably affect people’s estimation of Trump’s chances of staying in office.
The last time we saw such large trading numbers on these markets was on December 1, 2017 – the day Michael Flynn (Trump’s former National Security Advisor) pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in its Russia investigation. With new twists in the administration’s various scandals coming thick and fast, it seems safe to say there are other spikes to come – but whether they will shift the odds is another matter.
Christoph Siemroth is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Essex. This piece originally appeared on The Conversation