Monday, October 10, 2016

The Chinese yuan just fell to a 6-year low against the US dollar

MONEY & MARKETS

The Chinese yuan just fell to a 6-year low against the US dollar

DAVID SCUTT

OCT 10, 2016, 1:15 PM

Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

The Chinese yuan is reeling upon the resumption of trade following Golden Week holidays.

The USD/CNY, onshore traded yuan, hit a session high of 6.7040 just moments ago, marking the weakest level for the yuan against the US dollar since September.

USD/CNY Daily Chart. Source: Thomson Reuters

Earlier in the session the People’s Bank of China set the USD/CNY midpoint at 6.7008, up from the close of September 3 of 6.6745.

The move in onshore traded yuan today mirrors that seen last week in offshore traded yuan, or USD/CNH, as the US dollar strengthened as speculation over a December rate hike from the US Federal Reserve rose.

USD/CNH is currently trading at 6.7106.

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Computers running Google Chrome could soon run faster thanks to a new update

Antonio Villas-Boas

2h
3,812
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Shutterstock/Evan Lorne

We're not usually excited by web browser updates, but this particular upcoming update coming to Chrome could actually have a decent impact on your computer's performance.

Google will roll out an update on December 6 that will dramatically reduce the amount of RAM, or memory, that its Chrome web browser uses by up to 50%, according to CNET. So, if Chrome uses 100 megabytes of your RAM now, it'll use 50 when you install the update.

How does this help my computer?

By using less RAM, Chrome will let keep more open tabs and run more apps without slowing down your computer as much. It also means you don't need to worry as much about closing Chrome tabs or quitting apps.

Indeed, your computer has a finite amount of RAM memory, and Chrome is a gluttonous memory hog that consumes a large chunk of your computer's memory. If you have a bunch of open Chrome tabs, it might not leave very much memory for other apps. In fact, Chrome can take up so much RAM that it doesn't leave enough for itself if you have too many open tabs.

Here's what a "stick" of RAM looks like. It's essentially a super-fast SSD. PC Part Picker

It could also help if your computer is on the low-end in terms of memory, which ranges from four gigabytes and below.

Super quick rundown of what RAM is

Memory is used to temporarily store the open apps you're using into your computer's proverbial "back pocket," so it can bring them up again quickly when you need them. For example, if you have Chrome, Word, and Spotify open, those apps and whatever you're doing with them will be stored in your computer's RAM memory so you can switch between them quickly.

The more RAM, the bigger the "back pocket," and the more open apps you can run while your computer runs smoothly.

It's about time Google is cutting down the amount of RAM consumed by Chrome, because I'm constantly closing apps and restarting my computer, and all I'm doing is using Chrome.

NOW WATCH: Chrome has a ton of hidden features — here’s how to find and enable them

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Russia Warns Nuclear War With U.S. Could Be Imminent

BY IKE MCLEAN/ OCTOBER 6, 2016/ MILITARY

Tension between the United States and Russia is beginning to rise and has led to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday proposing a law suspending a Moscow-Washington agreement to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, in addition to the U.S suspending negotiations with Russia on Monday.

Both Russia and the United States are still heavily armed with nuclear weapons, and an official TV channel in Russia has issued a warning that war with the West could be imminent.

Zvezda, a nationwide TV service run by the country’s Ministry of Defence, said last week, ‘Schizophrenics from America are sharpening nuclear weapons for Moscow.’

As Russia issued this warning it is currently evacuating 40 million people in a drill.

A Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters spokesman said: “The three-stage four-day drill involves more than 40 million people, more than 200,000 specialists of rescue units based in regions, organizations and enterprises, as well as some 50,000 units of equipment.”

“Management bodies and forces of the Emergency Ministry’s territorial bodies have been put on simulated high alert.”

“Representatives of federal executive authorities, heads of regions, local governments and organizations are taking part in the massive drill.”

“Emergency Ministry’s forces and facilities are fully engaged, including rescue military divisions, rescue units, paramilitary mine rescue units and State Small Vessels Inspectorate, fire departments and aircraft.”

“The topic of the drill is Organization of civil defense during large natural and man-caused disasters in the Russian Federation.”

Minister of Emergency Situations Vladimir Puchkov said: ‘Civil defense system solves a wide range of tasks related to protection of people, material and cultural values in each constituent territory of the Russian Federation.” He also added that Russia has enough resources to respond to massive disasters.

“Modern approaches to foundation of control centers are being implemented, there is a set of automatized database forming systems, modeling of different threats and risks, satellite monitoring and forecasting system which uses Russian-made solutions and technologies.”

“The Emergency Ministry, federal executive authorities and regions have material and other resources to ensure uninterrupted operation of transport, power supply and communication systems.”

“It has proven efficient in the past three years.”

“We are restoring roads, building temporary bridges and handle many other problems.”

“During the drill we are going to inspect what was planned to be inspected and make suggestions on building-up the potential and areas of developing civil defense considering risks and threats, civil defense plans are going to be revised and suggestions will be made for summary rules of national standards.”

The United States and Russia are prepping for doomsday

Jeffrey Lewis, Foreign Policy

12h
9,507
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A frontal view of four B-61 nuclear free-fall bombs on a bomb cart at Barksdale Air Force Base.United States Department of Defense SSGT Phil Schmitten

The other day, a little present arrived in the mail. It was book, or rather a pair of doorstops. Titled "Doomed to Cooperate," the massive two-volume set is about 1,000 pages of essays, interviews, and vignettes from more than 100 participants in the remarkable period of cooperation between the nuclear weapons complexes of the United States and Russia in the immediate post-Cold War period.

Siegfried Hecker, who edited the volumes, titled them after the remark of a Soviet scientist, who said of the shared danger that nuclear weapons pose, "Therefore, you know, we were doomed to work together, to cooperate." Not everyone got the message, certainly not Vladimir Putin.

Set against relations between Washington and Moscow today, the incredible stories in Hecker's two volumes seem to be from another era entirely. On Monday, Putin issued a decreesuspending a plutonium disposition agreement with the United States due to its "unfriendly actions." (An unofficial translation is available from the Center for Energy and Security Studies in Moscow, as is a draft law submitted by the Kremlin.) Putin's decree ends one of the last remaining forms of cooperation from that remarkable era.

"Plutonium disposition" is a fancy sort of phrase, the kind of term of art that, when I drop it at a cocktail party, sends people off to refill their drinks. But plutonium is the stuff of which bombs are made.

After the Cold War, the United States and Russia agreed to dispose of tons of plutonium to make sure it could never be put back into bombs. So believe you me, when the Russians decide that maybe they should just hang on to that material for a while longer, it's not so boring.

Massive stockpiles of plutonium

And we're talking about a lot of plutonium here. If you recall the dark days of the Cold War, or maybe just read about them in a book, the United States and Soviet Union each had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

That's sort of insane if you think about what just one nuclear bomb did to Hiroshima and another to Nagasaki. But the United States and the Soviet Union each built stockpiles in excess of 30,000 nuclear weapons at their peak, massive arsenals of nuclear weapons that vast exceeded any conceivable purpose. And at the beating heart of the vast majority of those bombs were tiny little pits of plutonium.

Washington and Moscow have made great strides in reducing their vast nuclear arsenals, although we still have more than enough nuclear weapons to kill each other and then make the rubble bounce. The United States, for example, has reduced its stockpile from a peak of 31,255 nuclear weapons in 1967 to 4,571 in 2015. Let's just say Russia's stockpile is comparable, though perhaps not quite as modest.

Every nuclear weapons delivery system in the U.S. arsenal — the so-called triad of bombers, ballistic missiles and submarines — will have to be replaced in the coming 30 years. James Kimber/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters

Of course, retiring a nuclear weapon requires it to be dismantled. In the United States, a backlog of thousands of weapons awaits dismantlement. That queue stretches to 2022, and few experts think the United States willmeet that target. And even once a weapon is dismantled, that still leaves the plutonium. As long as the plutonium exists, it can be turned back into a nuclear bomb.

The United States and Russia have lots and lots of plutonium left over from the Cold War. Neither country makes new plutonium anymore, or at least no weapons-grade plutonium, but don't worry — there's still more than enough to keep you up at night.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials, at Princeton University, estimates the stockpiles of weapons-grade plutoniumat 88 metric tons for the United States and 128 metric tons for Russia. To give you a sense of how much plutonium that is, it is an unclassified fact that a nuclear weapon can be made with as little as 4 kilograms of plutonium. It's aslightly touchier subject that this is the average in the U.S. stockpile — one can make do with less. But let's do the math: Even at 4 kilograms per nuclear weapon, 88 metric tons represents enough material for 22,000 nuclear weapons.

One hundred and twenty-eight metric tons is enough for 32,000 nuclear weapons. Want to get your arms race on?

Resuming the arms race?

When the Cold War ended, the more enlightened souls among us realized that reducing these stockpiles of plutonium was a critical task. As long as the plutonium remained, so did the possibility of resuming the arms race. Or, god forbid, the possibility the material might fall into the wrong hands.

A pair of studies by the National Academy of Sciences (published in 1994 and1995) called excess fissile material a "clear and present danger to national and international security."

A deactivated Soviet-era SS-4 medium range nuclear capable ballistic missile displayed at La Cabana fortress in Havana, on Oct. 13, 2012. Desmond Boylan/Reuters

The United States and Russia freely admitted that much of their stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium was excess to any conceivable need. In addition to programs to help Russia keep track of its massive amount of material, Washington and Moscow agreed to eliminate some of it.

For the plutonium stockpile, in 2000 the United States and Russia each offered 34 metric tons for elimination under the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement. That represents 8,500 nuclear weapons that Russia will never build and another 8,500 nuclear weapons that will never enter the U.S. arsenal. Of course, that was only a portion of the massive stockpile, but along with an agreement to "downblend" highly enriched uranium, it was a promising start to making sure the arms race never started up again.

And then … nothing happened. As it turns out, Washington and Moscow make better enemies than friends. Plutonium isn't easy to dispose of, and the United States and Russia quarreled endlessly about how to eliminate the material. The story of why the material was never disposed of is long and complicated, involving different technological attitudes in Russia and the United States, as well as healthy helpings of South Carolina barbecued pork. The simplest way to put it is this: The United States and Russia quickly fell to arguing, requiring a new disposition plan in 2007, followed by more arguing until the disposition plan was amended in 2010, and both sides were still arguing about amending the deal when Putin finally pulled the plug this week. Pavel Podvig, who literally wrote the book on Russia's nuclear program, tells the whole sordid story if you want to read about it.

Plutonium. Department of Energy

The future

At some level, though, the details don't matter. The technical and political questions of how best to eliminate the plutonium pale in comparison to the political urgency of eliminating the threat it poses — they should. If either side wanted a solution, there were options. Knowledgeable observers like Podvig offered plenty of constructive solutions that might have kept the agreement alive. We collectively chose to do nothing.

And so here we are. Putin's decree states that Russia isn't planning on turning the plutonium back into weapons just yet. But there is no reason it couldn't. And there is no clear plan for what happens to it now. The plan seems to be that the United States and Russia will simply continue to sit on tens of thousands of nuclear weapons' worth of plutonium for the indefinite future. (Oh, and plutonium ages better than Sophia Loren, so the bombs that might be built out of it could be menacing your grandchildren.)

If you think about it, this isn't really a plan at all — just a terrible inability to do anything in the face of a common danger or head off what looks like a return to Cold War animosity.

If anything makes Hecker's collection of stories seem like they come from another time, it is that. Once upon a time, there was a collective belief among American and Russian scientists that they could do something about the shared danger posed by nuclear weapons. They may have joked about being "doomed to cooperate," but it was a wry humor. These men and women who were charged with building the weapons to destroy one another still believed that we could work together to make the world a safer place.

We've lost that sense. And without the belief that we can cooperate, what are we other than doomed?

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More: Foreign Policy Vladimir Putin Plutonium Nuclear Arms

Too many people are pretending to be rich

Trent Hamm, The Simple Dollar

Nov. 2, 2015, 3:07 PM
609,801
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Flickr/Ben

Recently, I had a great email exchange with a reader whom we'll call "Tim" about the incoming financial struggles of his in-laws as they age.

His mother- and father-in-law are in their early seventies and have virtually nothing put away for retirement. Before too long, they're going to be unable to work, and because his spouse is an only child, his in-laws are expecting that Tim's family will take them in.

On the other hand, Tim's parents are in their early sixties and already retired and will almost assuredly never become a financial burden to Tim and his spouse and children.

I asked Tim what he thought the difference between the two situations was. Was it income? Was it planning ahead? What caused the difference in the two situations? He put it very simply.

"My parents didn't spend their adulthood pretending to be rich."

It was such an insightful statement that it left me thinking for days.

In some ways, Tim's parents parallel our own parents. My mother and father are retired now — my mother's in her early sixties and my father in his early seventies. My father actually retired almost a decade ago. They've never spent much money in their lives. When I was little, they were very frugal, often not even by choice, so living on a small income is naturally easy for them.

My wife's parents are doing things differently. They are about the same age as my parents, but neither one intends to fully retire for many years, though they are saving for it. Instead, they travel quite a bit under the reasonable assumption that they might not be in adequate health to do so when they are older. They'll be able to retire for a few years when they are substantially older, but they likely won't do so until they need to for health reasons.

When you get right down to it, the big reason that many people don't save for the future is thatthey would rather spend their money now. They have things that they want today — houses, cars, consumer goods, travel, clothing, electronics, and so on — and those things come before things like saving for retirement.

In truth, a balanced financial life that involves living within your means includes things like saving for retirement. A normal financial life should include saving at least 10% for the future before anything else, because without that, you're walking a high wire without a safety net during the later years of your life when you are in declining health. That was the only way that people found financial security in the past.

The last generation or two have been able to get around that thanks to pension programs and Social Security. Those things have essentially taken the place of retirement savings for many people in retirement today. So, during their adult lives, many of them have never needed to actually save for retirement.

That safety net is gone for most of us who are currently in the workforce. I know no one that has a traditional pension — the best that any of my friends have is a individual retirement plan that is contributed to by his employer regardless of whether he donates, but that contribution plus Social Security would still make for a very meager retirement.

Flickr / Doug Wertman

What does all of this mean? If people want to be able to do anything in their later years besides working until they die, then they have to start living a balanced financial life that includes at least 10% contributions to retirement. Period. There is no special magic trick that makes it possible to not do this. Yet by any accounts, most Americans do not save adequately for retirement.

Why do people not do that? It's simple. Most people place a much higher priority on the things they want right now in order to live an affluent lifestyle. People have a stark choice between the biggest excesses in all of their spending, the least important things they choose to spend their money on, and saving for retirement, and over and over again they choose those least important items. They choose things like a double mocha latte or the latest iPhone over the security of their future selves.

People live as though they have more income than they actually do, and in order to do that they cut out retirement savings (and sometimes even get into credit card debt).

In other words, it's exactly like my reader described. Many people spend their life pretending to be wealthier than they are.

Why do people do that, though? What's the reason?

Some people do it to impress others, but that's a questionable reason due to the spotlight effect. In reality, few people even notice the car you drive or the clothes you wear, and even fewer really care.

There are many techniques for overcoming the spotlight effect, but they all boil down to one thing: spend your spare time improving yourself, so that you no longer have to feel as though you need to "fake it until you make it." Instead, you have real value to add, so you don't need to put up a false front about yourself.

Reuters

Some people do it for the purposes of retail therapy, because spending makes them feel better about their situation. Doing this converts shopping into entertainment, which not only is an expensive form of entertainment but also eats up time from many other forms of entertainment.

There are several good strategies for overcoming retail therapy, including keeping constant reminders of your big goals, automating your savings, talking to your friends during rational moments outside of those shopping splurges, focusing on friendships that don't engage in retail therapy, making your spending tools difficult to access, and actively seeking non-financial outlets for your emotional peaks and valleys.

Some people are heavily influenced by the media and take their cues for how to behave and what to buy from television, magazines, and other sources.

The key to solving this challenge is by changing your media diet. For me, the biggest key was simply watching less television, which is something I did gradually over the years until now where my television watching is minimal. Most of my reading is in the form of books, too, so I don't see many magazine ads.

Some people are heavily influenced by their friends and neighbors and take their cues from their spending habits. After all, in the words of Jim Rohn, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

The best strategy here is to never live in a neighborhood where you have the lowest income — you should be above average in income in your neighborhood, so you never have the need to spend to "keep up with the Joneses." You should also re-evaluate your social circle and make an effort to spend more time with friends who don't choose to spend as much.

Some people would rather "live it up" while they are young and healthy rather than saving money for when they are old and perhaps not so healthy. They believe their "future selves" will take care of it.

The problem here is that you simply don't know what your future will bring. Employment options tend to change when you get older, as do your physical limitations, and with the rapid changes in technology, it is really, really hard to guess what life will be like 20 years down the road. Retirement savings isn't just money to live off of when you're old. It's money to ensure that you can survive during your later years when the "rules" of your life have changed quite a bit, both in terms of your own situation and the changes in society.

Tristan Fewings/Getty

All of these things are simply excuses for people to pretend to be rich right now and thus, by extension, not save adequately for their future. Do any of them ring a bell for you? Most of them did for me in the past, but I've made a conscious effort to reduce their impact and I can't help but see the positive effect those changes have had on my spending. I don't feel nearly as compelled to spend as I once was, yet I don't feel as though my life is "deprived" in any way. I feel at peace because I know my future is taken care of, which is really nice.

Don't pretend to be rich. It might feel good in the moment, but that feeling doesn't last. It leaves you with stress when you reflect on your life and it leaves you with limited options even just a few years down the road.

The best thing you can do is start saving for retirement today. Don't give yourself time to talk yourself out of it. Sign up for a retirement plan at work (a 401(k) or something similar) or sign up for an individual retirement plan through your investment firm of choice (I use Vanguard) and start contributing immediately. Then, choose to live a little less "rich" than before.

You'll never regret it.

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More: Wealth Psychology Of Money The SImple Dollar

Monday, October 10, 2016