Automation vs. Immigration: Google Self-Driving Cars Face Competition in Concept

The front page of Saturday’s San Jose Mercury News had a headline: “For Google, race is on with self-driving cars.”

The game has changed with so many players on the field, as various companies have made their intentions known to build a self-driving car. Google self-driving vehicles have been designed as being totally driver-free, as can be seen by the lack of a steering wheel. Meanwhile, some companies have marketed their advanced cruise control as “self-driving” as one did with deadly results: Tesla advertised its system as “Autopilot” which led to the death of a Florida man who thought the technology functioned as described.

Interestingly, a Rasmussen poll from a couple months ago found that 52 percent of voters think robot cars will make the roads less safe, but business sees an automated future and believes public opinion can be readjusted.

As the Mercury reports, the pressure of suddenly facing so many competitors has forced the Google car company to step up its game.

As usual, there is no mention of the effect to society of gutting a major sector of the jobs economy, namely driving. More than three million Americans make their living by driving delivery vans, taxis, buses and 18-wheelers, but they are little discussed by the press when presenting its techno-news about automation.

And given the shrinking employment universe caused by technology, it makes no sense for the government to continue importing foreign workers under its anti-American immigration policies to fill jobs that no longer exist:

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

San Jose, of course, is at the heart of Silicon Valley and the major newspaper essentially serves the industry.

Google’s rivals in self-driving cars may force it into hard choice, San Jose Mercury News, August 26, 2016

MOUNTAIN VIEW — The sudden acceleration in deployment of self-driving technology could confront Google with a choice: stick to its fundamental plan to develop fully autonomous vehicles or downshift to join rivals who are poised to put less-advanced semi-autonomous cars on the road first.

Amid a blitz of progress announcements this month from robot-car firms that could beat Google to commercial success, the Mountain View tech titan on Friday confirmed it has hired a new head of its self-driving program who is known for steering the successful expansion of Airbnb into a new market.

“At some point the rubber has to hit the road,” said Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Raj Rajkumar, whose work is focused on self-driving cars. “My understanding is they’ve spent several hundreds of millions of dollars on this project, and that they’re still spending $100 million a year. As far as I know there’s not a single penny of revenue. With the new Airbnb executive, they have to look at what are the opportunities for monetizing.”

But while Google has adhered to a belief that self-driving cars should only go to market when the need for human intervention has been eliminated — a step many experts believe is years away — the firm’s rivals are already putting out self-driving systems that stop short of full autonomy but take much of the work out of driving.

Tesla and other carmakers, including Honda, BMW, Volvo and Mercedes, are introducing cars with semi-autonomous features such as emergency braking, lane keeping and collision avoidance.

Other companies are rushing to put fully autonomous vehicles to work, even if humans are still needed as backup. Last week, Uber announced it would start testing 100 self-driving, ride-hailing cars with human drivers prepared to take over in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this month. This week, self-driving software firm nuTonomy started a pilot “robo-taxi” project in Singapore deploying self-driving cars, also with people on board ready to assume control, and automotive suppliers Delphi Automotive and Israeli startup Mobileye announced a partnership to build self-driving systems that carmakers could put in their vehicles by the end of 2019.

Earlier this month, Ford said it was doubling in size its 130-member Silicon Valley self-driving car team and adding two new buildings to meet its target of selling fully autonomous vehicles by 2021. In May, General Motors and ride-hailing firm Lyft said they would begin testing self-driving electric taxis on public roads by year’s end.

But not all has gone smoothly for self-driving technology. Tesla’s “Autopilot” mode showcases the value of the incremental approach — and the perils. The technology is considered road ready by regulators and has helped the firm successfully market its pricey electric vehicles. However, the death earlier this year of a driver who failed to intervene when the Autopilot system in his Tesla missed seeing a truck in its path, shows exactly what Google has been hoping to avoid by pushing for full automation instead of a step-by-step process.

“This has been the debate roiling the community,” Rajkumar said.

But now, with competitors racing for market share, Google must decide whether to hang onto full autonomy, which Rajkumar believes is at least a decade away. Within Google, debates over the self-driving car program are bound to focus on whether to pivot toward an incremental approach to autonomy, Rajkumar believes.

Google declined to comment.

With new disruptions in the self-driving car industry erupting virtually every week, and turmoil within the Google robot-car program — chief technology officer Chris Urmson quit earlier this month, following at least two engineers out the door — the company has brought in former Airbnb executive Shaun Stewart as director of the program. Stewart had been hired at Airbnb from TripAdvisor in 2014, to expand Airbnb’s reach to vacation rentals from urban home and room rentals.

“I see a lot of parallels,” said Douglas Quinby, vice president of research at travel industry research firm Phocuswright. “His job was to basically commercialize Airbnb for the vacation-rental world. Airbnb is a company that is very disruptive. He’s proved to be a pretty capable bridge to build inroads for Airbnb into what should be a pretty significant market opportunity.”

Although Google hasn’t revealed what, exactly, will be Stewart’s primary goals, he has shown an ability to build relationships with partner organizations and technology companies that were important to Airbnb’s success in breaking into the vacation rentals market, Quinby said.

“Shaun is certainly an interesting choice,” Quinby said. “He’s shown he can certainly do it through travel.”

http://www.vdare.com/posts/automation-vs-immigration-google-self-driving-cars-face-competition-in-concept

Men fall from ceiling in robbery attempt at check cashing store, one suspect shot in exchange of gunfire

Two men allegedly trying to rob a south Macon check cashing store fell through the ceiling Saturday morning and one was shot during an exchange of gunfire, according to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

The manager of Discount Check Cashing, 1411 Rocky Creek Road, and an employee reportedly heard noises in the ceiling sometime before 9:15 a.m., and as the manager investigated, two men fell from the ceiling, according to a sheriff’s office news release.

While one of the men tried to rob the business, a man in the store exchanged gunfire with one of the suspects, according to the release.

One of the suspects, 22-year-old Rarrekcus Delbridge, of Lawrenceville, was shot in the leg. He was taken to The Medical Center, Navicent Health, where he was later charged with aggravated assault and criminal attempt to commit armed robbery. When Delbridge is released from the hospital, he’ll be taken to the Bibb County jail, according to the sheriff’s office.

The other suspect, described as a black man with dreadlocks wearing a red zip-up hooded jacket and black pants, was last seen running behind the Piggly Wiggly grocery store at 1425 Rocky Creek Road. It’s unknown if he was struck by the gunfire, according to the release.

Anyone with information about the robbery attempt or the second suspect’s whereabouts, is asked to call the sheriff’s office at 751-7500 or Macon Regional Crimestoppers at 877-68-CRIME.

http://www.macon.com/news/local/crime/article98321552.html

225+ heroin overdoses in 4 counties in 4 states in 1 week

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CINCINNATI — An overdose crisis in the past week has left police and emergency responders here drained and without clues.

It has also underscored that this region does not have resources to treat all of people addicted to opioids, including heroin.

Police are asking for the public's help in identifying the source of heroin sold here that caused scores of overdoses, including at least three deaths. More than 200 people in four states have been victims of what law enforcement officials are calling a supercharged form of the sedative, and one additional person died in Indiana.

"We're working very closely to find the source dealer," said Police Chief Tom Synan of Newtown, Ohio, who heads the law enforcement task force for the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition. He said local, state and federal authorities are combining their forces to investigate the source or sources. "We don't have anything solid to go off of."

The toll here has risen to an estimated 78 overdoses Tuesday and Wednesday alone and an estimated 174 overdose cases in emergency rooms in less than a week.

In other states just this week:

A similar cluster of overdoses occurred Aug. 15 in Huntington, W.Va., where 27 people overdosed within five hours, one fatally.

"This is unprecedented to see as many alerts as we've seen in the last six days," said Tim Ingram, health commissioner for Hamilton County where Cincinnati is the largest city. A surveillance system alerts the public health department when an unusual number of drug-related emergency-room encounters occur.

Police officers responding to overdoses are administering naloxone, sometimes in more than one dose, to resuscitate heroin users. (Photo: Andrew Burton, Getty Images)

Deaths have not spiked along with the overdose reports because police officers or emergency medical technicians are immediately administering naloxone, sometimes in more than one dose, to bring heroin users back to consciousness and start them breathing.

Cincinnati typically sees an average of four overdoses a day, according to a memo from City Manager Harry Black.

"It's unlike anything we've seen before," said Hamilton County Commissioner Dennis Deters, who called the outbreak a public health emergency.

The number of overdoses reported this week in the Cincinnati area has grown because several more agencies have added cases, officials said. The surveillance system does not give specifics but alerts on a breach of a threshold.

No samples of the Cincinnati-area drugs are available to test yet, according to Synan and Cincinnati Police Lt. Col. Mike John. The victims could have injected heroin mixed with the potent painkiller fentanyl or the mega-potent animal opioid carfentanil.

Carfentanil, an analgesic for large animals including elephants, was discovered in July in the region's heroin stream. In the memo, Black said carfentanil is believed to be the cause of the overdose spike the city is seeing now.

When an officer doesn't know if a person has overdosed on heroin, it's OK to hit them with a dose or two of naloxone, said Dr. Erik Kochert, program director in York Hospital's emergency room. Police in the Pennsylvania county of almost 450,000 already have administered the opioid antidote almost 250 times this year.

Even if the patient didn't overdose, naloxone won't cause any harm. It would just make a person wake up and experience withdrawal, Kochert said, which is better than not breathing.

Officials in Akron and Columbus have reported carfentanil in heroin found in their cities as well. Both locations have suffered from bouts of overdoses.

Hospitals in the region are not equipped to test blood for the animal opioid, which is rare and only in July surfaced in Greater Cincinnati's street heroin.

Can doctors test for carfentanil?

"Yes," said Dr. Shawn Ryan,  a certified addiction expert and founder of BrightView Health, an outpatient addiction medicine practice with offices in Norwood and Colerain Township in suburban Cincinnati.

But the drug is so rare and so new to the region, no local hospitals would have such tests available, he said.

"We can’t confirm in the short term if someone’s had fentanyl, carfentanil or heroin. The tests flag only as positive or negative for opiates," said Nanette Bentley, spokeswoman for Cincinnati's Mercy Health. Tests could be ordered, but results could take days to weeks to come back.

Deters announced Thursday in a news conference that he will ask his fellow county commissioners to come up with money for treatment to expand the Heroin and Opiates Response Team. Sheriff Jim Neil has thrown his support behind the move, and the two said that it's a direct response to the overdose crisis.

The teams would consist of a law enforcement officer, emergency responder and treatment specialist who would approach people who've overdosed and offer them treatment.

Colerain Township and Norwood already have such response teams, and Deters said the drop in overdoses in Colerain Township has been 35% since the work began a year ago. Norwood's started in July.

Cost of an expansion of the response teams is still being determined, he said.

Addiction experts across the nation consider it urgent to get to overdose survivors as quickly as possible to steer them into treatment. But that doesn't mean enough treatment is available.

"People overwhelmingly want help, but we have to have a place to take them," said Nan Franks, a facilitator for the Addiction Services Council of Cincinnati.

If all of those who need addiction treatment were to seek it at once, enough help wouldn't be available, she said.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has been on alert for carfentanil since its appearance in U.S. and at the Canadian border, said Melvin Patterson, a DEA spokesman in Washington. Officials have little doubt that the carfentanil that's showing up in street drugs is from overseas, just as fentanyl is manufactured and brought across the U.S. borders.

"It's such a restricted drug, there's only a handful of places in the United States that can have it," he said.

Patterson's agency is working with Chinese counterparts who want to stop the illegal shipments, he said. The drug sometimes is manufactured in China, delivered to Mexico, shipped to Canada and then to the United States.

He has heard some reports of it going directly to Canada and being intercepted by Mexican drug organizations, he said.

John, who is the Cincinnati Police Department's special services commander, said the week of overdoses has taken a toll on his force.

"It's been exhausting," John said. "They're running from one run to another."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/26/supercharged-heroin-ohio-ind-ky-nj/89409942/

Colin Kaepernick explains why he sat during national anthem

This is the guy who has Bible verses tattooed on his body. It’s a cinch he missed this verse:  “ Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord.” - Leviticus 19:28 (NIV)

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The 49ers quarterback refused to stand for the national anthem Friday, saying, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has willingly immersed himself into controversy by refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States.

His latest refusal to stand for the anthem -- he has done this in at least one other preseason game -- came before the 49ers' preseason loss to Green Bay at Levi's Stadium on Friday night.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

The 49ers issued a statement about Kaepernick's decision: "The national anthem is and always will be a special part of the pre-game ceremony. It is an opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem."

By taking a stand for civil rights, Kaepernick, 28, joins other athletes, like the NBA's Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony and several WNBA players in using their platform and status to raise awareness to issues affecting minorities in the U.S.

However, refusal to support the American flag as a means to take a stand has brought incredible backlash before and likely will in this instance. The NBA's Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, formerly Chris Jackson before converting to Islam, refused to acknowledge the flag in protest, citing similar reasons as Kaepernick and saying that it conflicted with some of his Islamic beliefs.

Abdul-Rauf drew the ire of fans and was briefly suspended by the NBA before a compromise was worked out between the league and player, who eventually stood with his teammates and coaches at the playing of the national anthem.

Kaepernick said that he is aware of what he is doing and that he knows it will not sit well with a lot of people, including the49ers. He said that he did not inform the club or anyone affiliated with the team of his intentions to protest the national anthem.

"This is not something that I am going to run by anybody," he said. "I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. ... If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right."

Kaepernick said that he has thought about going public with his feelings for a while but that "I felt that I needed to understand the situation better."

He said that he has discussed his feelings with his family and, after months of witnessing some of the civil unrest in the U.S., decided to be more active and involved in rights for black people. Kaepernick, who is biracial, was adopted and raised by white parents and siblings.

Kaepernick's Twitter feed is filled with civil rights messages.

The former Super Bowl starting quarterback's decision to go public comes while he is fighting for his football life with the49ers, who drafted him in the second round in 2011. He lost his starting job last season after being one of the most promising players in the NFL during his run under former coach Jim Harbaugh.

Over the past few months, his relationship with management has turned sour. He requested a trade last spring, which never came. He also has spent most of the offseason rehabilitating from operations to his left (non-throwing) shoulder, his hand and knee. His recovery left him unable to fully compete with Blaine Gabbert for months and has him seemingly in a bind to regain his starting job.

He made his preseason debut against the Packers and played in the second quarter, completing two of six passes for 14 yards. He looked as rusty as you'd expect from someone who has not played since last November.

Following the game, and without any knowledge of Kaepernick's non-football behavior, coach Chip Kelly said that there has never been any discussion about cutting Kaepernick. NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport added Saturday that Kelly will make"football decisions" on Kaepernick, despite the quarterback's comments.

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-protest-of-national-anthem

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos

Diversity + Proximity = War.

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Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.

Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda or Yugoslavia boast that they were “diverse.” Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.

When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.

For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.

Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity and freedom?

America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.

We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South’s “one-drop rule” has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the “majority.” Yet “white” is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.

In California, those who check “white” on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms and set up “Caucasian Studies” programs at universities?

Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?

If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word “diversity” and now prefers “inclusion.”

A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not “culturally appropriating” anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.

Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.

African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.

Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct.

No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.

Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/44461

The Truth About the Milwaukee Riots

Jared Taylor of American Renaissance explains the causes and consequences of the 2016 Milwaukee riots. Blacks rioted over a police killing even when the officer who did the shooting was black. They burned down businesses even though the officer's body cam shows he was facing a man with a gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZILczN5BVsQ

Hillary Swings Open The Overton Window To The Alt-Right

I thought of this immediately when I heard she planned this line of attack, but I didn’t post it because you never know who might be listening. I didn’t want her to pull back.

In cognitive neuroscience, you can make one idea more acceptable to individuals, by priming them with more extreme ideas. So if you ask somebody to buy a $5 candy bar, they may say it is too pricey and demure. But show them $10 and $15 dollar candy bars all day, and suddenly that $5 one looks much more acceptable by the end of the day. Within public discourse, the idea is often encapsulated in the concept of the Overton Window.

If Donald is a five dollar candy bar, then by discussing the Alt-Right, Hillary has just shown the nation a series of $100 and $200 dollar candy bars.

What Hillary has done is expose the entire nation to a set of ideas that is considerably more right-wing than that which the debate has been limited to, to date. In the old range of ideas the media gave voice to, which basically was ultra-left to moderate-left, Donald’s public advocacy was considerably to the right of that range of media-approved ideas. Much of his press has arisen because he gave voice to ideas that were previously verboten in public discourse within the media.

The mushy, clueless parts of the public which only get their limited data from the media, (which probably unduly fill the ranks of the moderates and independents who decide elections), only hearing the old range of ideas, would perceive Donald as somewhat outside that range of ideas, and thus extremist. That probably cost him support there.

Now, as the media lays out this whole new range of ideas to the public and explains them, Donald suddenly appears far more moderate by comparison. In fact, there is a whole range of far more “extreme” ideas out there that are to the right of Donald. Donald just became a moderate, and Hillary did it for him.

Hillary meanwhile, who had previously been ensconced well within the middle of the range of left-wing media-approved ideas, now seems considerably out toward the outer edge of the left-wing within this new Overton Window Hillary has created. She simultaneously moderated the views of Donald, and made herself seem extreme, and neither candidate even had to change their views.

I have to confess, I am stunned Hillary went through with this. All day yesterday I was sure Cialdini, the “Godfather Of Influence” was going to get on the horn and tell her to pull back. It was just too stupid. It is possibly among the most stupid moves anyone has made since Dukakis decided to drive around in that tank. It calls into question the entire competency of her campaign.

What I think we will begin to see now is a lot of unforced errors being made by the left. As the nation polarizes and turns K-selected/rightward in response to all the shortage and threat, the response of leftists is to shut out everything they don’t want to hear. This isolates them from the reality of the increasingly right-wing political situation on the ground. The echo chamber it creates reinforces a leftist mindset which is inherently unable to perceive how the normal, increasingly K-ified, right-leaning population will respond. Even worse, the more society ignores them, the more the left panics and isolates itself, and the worse their future decisions will be.

I suspect within Hillary’s camp, this was seen as a brilliant play. All of the rabbits agreed, all she had to do was point at the Alt-Right and shriek, and the whole nation would immediately begin pointing and shrieking with her. That is the extent of their delusional state.

But out in the real world, where the K-selected Strategy is ascendant, all that happened was a whole lot of people suddenly said, “Oh wow! Are we now allowed to say those things in public? I’ve been thinking exactly that all along!” Meanwhile the people who didn’t say that said, to themselves, “I need to check out this new Alt-Right thing, if everybody is talking about it.”

And just like that, Hilary swung open the Overton Window, made Donald a moderate, and made the left into an extremist ideology at the outer edge of the left side of the political spectrum.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/hillary-swings-open-the-overton-window-to-the-alt-right/

A $67,000 Home Robbery Exposes $500 Billion Problem in Argentina

  Argentines don’t trust the banks or the government. Argentina's economy collapsed in December 2001 and it has never completely recovered since.  Consequently they tend to keep their money in cash hidden in their homes,  “stuffed in their mattress” like Americans who lived through the Great Depression 80 years ago and lost their savings in the bank failures.

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The case of $67,000 stolen from Argentine Vice President Gabriela Michetti’s house should have ended when her bodyguard was arrested.

Instead, prosecutors have shifted to tracing the money’s origin, making her a public example of the challenges President Mauricio Macri’s faces in weaning the country off its reliance on cash, an age-old system that in many instances hides tax evasion.

Elected last November on a vow to reverse 12 years of leftist populism, Macri ended currency controls, reformed the statistics bureau and settled a toxic dispute over bond payments. Now his sights are set on modernizing the economy and pulling Argentines into the banking system. It’s a push that Macri’s predecessors tried many times before, to little avail, as an estimated $500 billion was stashed away over the past 30 years.

The case “shows that practices such as this carried out over decades have become part of the culture,” said Jorge Gaggero, founder of the Tax Justice Network for Latin America and the Caribbean. “A behavior that in other countries would seem dysfunctional for people here is natural.”

Swiss Accounts

In May, the government announced a tax amnesty to capture some of the undeclared funds kept in safety deposit boxes, Swiss bank accounts and in properties in Uruguay’s Punta del Este, a favored beach resort. Argentines who come clean on their untaxed savings by the end of March will pay a one-off fine of as much as 15 percent. They can also invest in three-year and six-year Treasury bonds or make long-term investments in infrastructure projects, housing, mortgages or small- and medium-sized businesses.

Michetti has denied any wrongdoing and said that the money that was stolen had been declared to tax authorities. Paula Schuster, Michetti’s spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the vice president had no further comment on the matter.

The central bank has issued regulations forbidding banks from charging for opening a savings account or for making electronic transfers. It has also warned banks it will begin charging them for delivery of cash.

Only 50 percent of Argentines owned a bank account in 2014, according to a World Bank report, compared with 68 percent in Brazil and 63 percent in Chile. The only countries with 100 percent bank account penetration were Sweden, New Zealand and Norway.

Persuading Argentines to join the banking system would significantly increase the government’s tax-gathering capacity, Marcelo Costa, director of compliance at the tax agency, said in an interview in Buenos Aires.

More Weapons

None of the previous four amnesties carried out in the last 30 years has proven very successful but the government says it has more weapons in its arsenal this time. Sharing of tax information among countries is improving, especially after member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (excluding the U.S.) agreed to open their books starting next year.

“A bank isn’t going to hide an asset because that bank will end up with a criminal investigation,” Costa said.

Cash in circulation in Sweden is just over 2 percent of gross domestic product and the value of bank notes in circulation has dropped by almost 25 percent since 2011.

“We are receiving personal advice from the president of the central bank of Sweden, a country where just 6 percent of transactions are carried out using cash,” central bank President Federico Sturzenegger said in a speech on April 26.

Michetti said on Facebook last month that her stolen cash was a combination of donations from a dinner for her charitable foundation, household expenses and a loan from her boyfriend. A bodyguard has been charged. But the investigation into the origins of the cash continues.

Common Practice

On Facebook, she agreed that the money should have been deposited in a bank but said some of it was earmarked for builders working on her house who wanted to be paid in cash -- a common practice.

Such habits are dauntingly hard to change. In 2014, a third of the Argentine workforce wasn’t registered on payrolls, according to Salvador Treber, an analyst in Cordoba. He suspects that number has risen further as economic growth slowed following the austerity measures Macri implemented.

The economy shrank 0.7 percent in the first quarter, its third consecutive quarter-on-quarter contraction. That has made boosting tax revenue all the more urgent as revenue this year has plummeted to about half the rate of inflation.

The magnitude of the problem is brought into focus by the black market currency traders -- known as arbolitos, or little trees -- who still line the streets in downtown Buenos Aires. Over the past dozen years, they were emblematic of the distortions wrought by capital controls. Now that the controls are gone, they demonstrate the pervasiveness of tax dodging, said Juan Manuel Vazquez, head analyst at Puente SA, a brokerage.

“There’s still a lot of income that comes from the informal economy and that money can’t enter through the formal circuit which is why these kinds of operations still exist,” Vazquez said.

Moldy Bills

On an intersection of pedestrianized streets, there are now about five arbolitos operating compared with about 20 during the previous government, said a money changer who asked not to be named because what he does is illegal. Many of his clients are tourists. The remainder are Argentines who don’t want to explain to authorities how they obtained their money, he said. He can tell the money has been kept at home because the bills are often moldy, he added.

Argentines’ dislike for paying taxes is partly driven by a mistrust of their government’s ability to manage the economy. The country has defaulted seven times in 200 years, most notably in 2001 when its citizens had their accounts frozen as the peso lost three-quarters of its value. When the economy improves, so does tax collection, said the tax agency’s Costa.

As for Michetti, the Nov. 22 robbery, on the night Macri was voted into power in a runoff election, is unearthing further damaging information. Her maid of 22 years told police that she regularly sees envelopes full of cash in the house and that she is paid about 1,000 pesos ($67) a week, below the minimum wage. The judge also wants to know why at the time of the burglary none of the staff at her foundation was registered with the tax agency.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-dollar67000-home-robbery-exposes-dollar500-billion-problem-in-argentina/ar-BBw4wJe?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=spartandhp

Scientists say woolly mammoth will return

Scientists say it is only a matter of time for the extinct Woolly Mammoth to make it's return and that it's a good thing. Veuer's Josh King has details.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/video/wonder/scientists-say-woolly-mammoth-will-return/vi-BBw3Q6v?ocid=spartandhp