Monthly Archives: April 2017

GolfTEC adds stores, improves technology for golf lessons – Golfweek.com

Posted: April 19, 2017 at 9:56 am

GolfTEC, which has given more than 7 million lessons to amateurs over 22 years, is undergoing a brand invigoration that includes updating the appearance and technology of more than 30 planned new stand-alone locations in the first half of this year and will reach all the companys more than 190 facilities in 2018.

The updates include new design of facilities, improved in-bay technology and enhanced clubfitting capabilities.

The technological improvements include better video capabilities for in-bay playback while a lesson is in progress and upgraded online playback so a student can revisit their lesson on their own. In-store improvements also include better lighting to help capture swings.

The companys new emphasis on clubfitting allows more options for custom shafts with a wider variety of heads. The company also will use software that helps match clubheads and shafts to a wide variety of swing types, serving as a starting point for a fitting. Combined with individual launch data, the fitting options should help a player find an optimal shaft and clubhead combination.

Included in the more than 30 stand-alone openings planned for the first half of 2017 are locations that already have opened in Birmingham, Ala.; Burnsville, Minn.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Ellicott City, Md.; Fort Worth, Texas; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Hartford, Conn.; Hong Kong; Houston; Lakewood, Colo.; Minnetonka, Minn.; Mission Viejo, Calif.; Plano, Texas; Roseville, Minn.; Tokyo; Tucson, Ariz.; and Woodbridge, N.J.

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Seagate Technology: High Yield Dividend Income Or Value Trap? – Seeking Alpha

Posted: at 9:56 am

Many of the most popular high yield stocks are real estate investment trusts (REITs), master limited partnership (MLPs), and business development companies (BDCs). All of these industries are designed to pay very high dividends.

When it comes to regular corporations, however, a very high dividend yield can be a warning sign that something is fundamentally flawed with the company's business model.

Many of these companies tend to have relatively low Dividend Safety Scores, indicating that their dividends could be at risk of being cut in the future.

Let's take a closer look at Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX), which offers a high dividend yield above 5% and has paid higher dividends for six straight years, to see if the stock could be appropriate for our Conservative Retirees dividend portfolio.

Business Overview

Founded in 1978 in Dublin, Ireland, Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest suppliers of data storage hardware, including hard drives, solid-state hybrid drives, solid-state flash-based drives, and memory cards.

The company's products are found in everything, from PCs, mobile phones, tablets, and digital video recorders (DVRs) to cloud computing servers.

However, Seagate's fortunes continued to be tied to its specialty, hard disk drives (HDDs), which is the industry it helped pioneer. HDDs are devices that store digital information on rotating disks with magnetic surfaces. They have been used in a number electronic devices, such as PCs, for decades.

Business Analysis

Up until recently, Seagate was flying high on the boom in demand for data storage devices.

While that demand continues to grow rampantly, the company is facing major challenges in growing its top and bottom line on two fronts.

(Source: Simply Safe Dividends)

First, the introduction of solid-state, NAND flash memory, or SSD technology, has really cut into Seagate's growth runway.

Unlike hard drive memory storage, which involves a physically spinning magnetic medium, solid-state NAND memory has no moving parts. This makes it more reliable (less likely to break), far more energy-efficient, and also much faster to operate (instant on versus boot up).

As a result, technology research firm Gartner forecast in early 2016 that enterprise SSD industry revenue could surpass HDD revenue this year.

The second major challenge Seagate has faced is that it's operating in a fiercely competitive and highly commoditized market, one that is increasingly pressured by weakening demand for desktop computers as well.

That results in weak pricing power, because increasing HDD production from low-cost rivals in Asia means the company is in a constant battle for market share, pressuring its margins and returns on shareholder capital.

You can see that the overall disk drive market's revenue has shrunk over the past two years, while Seagate's market share (green bars) has also declined. Toshiba's (OTCPK:TOSBF) share gain was driven at least in part by its broad presence in both HDDs and SSDs, which makes it easier for customers to consolidate their business with one supplier.

(Source: HotHardware.com)

However, the news isn't all bad for Seagate. For example, while the data storage business may have razor-thin margins, the company has been able to generate better-than-average returns thanks to its economies of scale and aggressive cost-cutting efforts.

(Source: Morningstar)

In fact, management's dedication to disciplined capital spending is why Seagate still generates substantial free cash flow, which allows it to return cash to shareholders via aggressive buybacks (share count declining by 7.1% CAGR over the past nine years) and one of the market's most generous dividends.

In addition, the overall market for data storage devices continues to grow at a torrid pace and is expected to rise to 1.181 million terabytes per year of shipments by 2020 (more than double 2015's shipments).

(Source: Seagate Technology)

The strong growth in data storage devices is due to a multitude of factors, including the rise of Big Data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the growth of Internet of Things (including driverless cars), and cloud computing.

In fact, the amount of data being generated per year is expected to rise almost 10-fold, from 16 zetabytes last year to 163 zetabytes (or 163 billion terabytes) by 2025.

Increasingly, more and more of this data is being stored in the cloud, requiring massive growth in giant data farms.

On a cost per GB basis, hard drives still have the upper hand, thanks to ongoing innovations by Seagate, such as heat-assisted magnetic recording.

This technology uses a laser to heat the part of the disk that data is being written to, which increases the data density of the material. In other words, it allows the company to increase the capacity of its hard drives, and thus prolongs the length of time that HDDs will have a cost advantage over solid-state devices.

However, it's important to remember that at some point, SSDs will likely come down in price enough to convince many of the world's data centers to switch to this competing technology.

This is really the largest risk to long-term Seagate investors.

Key Risks

The only reason that Seagate's business hasn't declined more in recent years is because the volume of data being generated by the world (and the need to store and analyze it) has grown so much faster than the improvements in SSD costs.

However, remember that SSDs are generally superior to hard drive storage because their lack of moving parts makes them much faster, more reliable (longer lasting), and energy-efficient.

At some point in the future, when SSDs become more cost-competitive with HDDs (which can only be improved so much based on physical limitations), the world's data centers are more likely to make the switch to run entirely on SSD-based server farms. That's especially true because SSD servers would be able to last far longer and consume vastly less power.

Considering that U.S. data centers are expected to consume 73 billion Kilowatt hours of power by 2020 (about 2% of all the electricity used in the U.S., which is enough to power 6.7 million American homes), improving the energy efficiency, and thus, cost effectiveness, of data centers is a secular trend that will only continue.

Can't Seagate simply transition to SSD-based technology? The answer is complicated, but over time, the company will be forced to evolve toward an entirely solid-state business model if it wants to survive.

However, the problem is that its expertise is in hard drives, and it doesn't seem to have a competitive advantage in SSD. In fact the company outsources its NAND flash solid state memory from Micron Technologies (NASDAQ:MU), specifically because it wants to minimize the high fixed costs that come with manufacturing this superior but more expensive form of memory storage.

That's in contrast to major rival Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC), which acquired SanDisk in 2016 for $16 billion specifically because it was one of the world's leading producers of solid-state memory.

In other words, Seagate is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the long-term future, precisely for the kind of short-term cost-cutting efforts it is currently pursuing (outsourcing SSD production) in order to stem the decline in its bottom line.

It is also a vertically integrated HDD manufacturer, making it more challenging and costly for the company to change directions.

As a result, Seagate's dividend is likely to come under increasing pressure and even face risk of being cut or suspended entirely over the coming years.

Seagate's Dividend Safety

We analyze 25+ years of dividend data and 10+ years of fundamental data to understand the safety and growth prospects of a dividend.

Our Dividend Safety Score answers the question, "Is the current dividend payment safe?" We look at some of the most important financial factors, such as current and historical EPS and FCF payout ratios, debt levels, free cash flow generation, industry cyclicality, ROIC trends, and more.

Dividend Safety Scores range from 0 to 100, and conservative dividend investors should stick with firms that score at least 60. Since tracking the data, companies cutting their dividends had an average Dividend Safety Score below 20 at the time of their dividend reduction announcements.

We wrote a detailed analysis reviewing how Dividend Safety Scores are calculated, what their real-time track record has been, and how to use them for your portfolio, here.

Seagate's Dividend Safety Score of 19 means it is one of the riskiest dividends on Wall Street. That should come as no shock to investors, since the company doesn't have that great record sustaining its payout during times of economic distress.

While Seagate has nicely increased its dividend in recent years, that's been driven by its decision to raise its payout ratios, which are now approaching more dangerous levels.

Then, there's the issue of the company's weakening balance sheet. While not yet dangerously overleveraged, with a current ratio still well above 1 and sufficient cash reserves to fund the dividend for the next nine quarters, Seagate's torrid pace of buybacks has largely been funded by rising debt levels.

You can see that its debt-to-capital ratio has increased meaningfully over the last decade. I prefer to invest in companies with a debt-to-capital ratio no higher than 50% in most cases.

While that may have worked when interest rates were at all-time lows and cheap debt capital was easily accessible, a rising interest rate environment could create a somewhat more challenging environment for the company.

When we compare Seagate's balance sheet to its industry peers, we similarly see cause for concern. While the leverage ratio is relatively low, at the same time, the company's high debt/capital ratio and lower-than-average current ratio give it a credit rating that is dangerously close to junk status.

(Sources: Morningstar, F.A.S.T. Graphs)

Combined with the decline of its core HDD business, which could eventually become obsolete, Seagate will need to devote a larger share of its free cash flow going forward to deleveraging. You can see that the company's sales have declined year over year in each of the last eight quarters.

In fact, rating firm Moody's recently warned that it has a negative outlook on the company's debt, which could soon result in a credit downgrade.

A downgrade to junk bond status could be troublesome for the company, because it would mean much higher refinancing costs in the future, as well as less flexibility when it comes to acquiring SSD manufacturing ability going forward.

Given that Seagate will eventually have to invest heavily in SSD to remain relevant in the coming years, the company might not be able to afford the $727 million annual dividend cost.

Seagate's Dividend Growth

Our Dividend Growth Score answers the question, "How fast is the dividend likely to grow?" It considers many of the same fundamental factors as the Safety Score, but places more weight on growth-centric metrics like sales and earnings growth and payout ratios. Scores of 50 are average, 75 or higher is very good, and 25 or lower is considered weak.

Seagate's Dividend Growth Score is 32, which at first may surprise you given the company's strong payout growth in recent years.

However, we need to remember that this is a company that appears to be in a secular decline.

Seagate will likely struggle with negative top and bottom line growth in the coming years, potentially causing its already high payout ratios to climb to unsustainable levels. That could explain why the dividend has been frozen for the last six quarters.

Worse still, given the company's worrisome business outlook, as well as its past history of completely eliminating its payout during the last recession, a best-case scenario for Seagate is likely one in which it can simply maintain the current dividend, with little to no long-term growth potential.

Even if management continues the dividend, the company seems likely to underperform the market in the long term, especially from today's high valuations.

Valuation

In the past year, Seagate has soared nearly 90%, compared to the S&P 500's total return of about 12%.

As you can see, not only is the company's current P/E far higher than its industry median, but it's also nearly triple its historic norm.

While the dividend yield is certainly attractive, and in fact, is higher than that of 88% of its peers, given the dangers of a future dividend cut, owning Seagate shares at these levels doesn't seem like a prudent idea to me.

(Source: GuruFocus)

Seagate's valuation almost seems to be completely ignoring the risk of SSDs to its core business. In fact, in its last earnings release, the company didn't even mention solid-state storage, and during the conference call, management only mentioned the term once.

I would prefer if Seagate more directly addressed this potentially existential threat, one that is likely to only further erode the company's sales, profits, and cash flow in the years to come.

Concluding Thoughts On Seagate Technologies

Given the secular headwinds to growth that Seagate is facing, even the current high yield doesn't compensate investors sufficiently for the risks that owning this company represents.

With many better-quality high yield stocks available, investors really have no reason to put their hard-earned money at risk with what could very likely prove to be a long-term value trap.

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‘Phenomenal’ progress in fighting tropical diseases – BBC News

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BBC News
'Phenomenal' progress in fighting tropical diseases
BBC News
The World Health Organisation said improving water and sanitation was key to driving further progress. The London meeting resulted in a pledge to control or eliminate 10 neglected tropical diseases - including guinea worm, river blindness and trachoma ...
WHO Reports 'Record-breaking' Progress in Fighting Neglected Tropical DiseasesVoice of America
WHO reports 'remarkable' progress after decade of fighting tropical diseasesDeutsche Welle
Unprecedented progress against neglected tropical diseases, WHO reportsWorld Health Organization
Devex -The Guardian -CTV News -Uniting to Combat NTDs
all 60 news articles »

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Trending: Real Madrid, Atletico progress as Bayern, Leicester exit – ESPN FC (blog)

Posted: at 9:55 am

Atletico and Leicester drew 1-1, sending Atleti through 2-1 overall, while Real won 4-2 in a wild game against Bayern. Relive the top moments from Tuesday's UCL matches, including Real Madrid's extra-time victory over Bayern Munich. Hitting a hat-trick and his 100th UCL goal, wasn't enough for Ronaldo to be effective overall says the FC panel.

Wednesday's latest stories from the world of football in ESPN FC's What's Trending...

REAL MADRID:Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo became the first player to score 100 goals in the Champions League when he netted a hat trick against Bayern Munich on Tuesday -- then used the occasion to ask for more respect from fans.

-Zinedine Zidane said it was Real Madrid's efforts -- not a poor refereeing display -- that was most important in his team's dramatic 4-2 extra-time victory over Bayern that sent them through 6-3 on aggregate to the Champions League semifinals.

-Sergio Ramos has told Gerard Pique to look at Barcelona's 6-1 win against Paris Saint-Germain after he appeared to question the validity of Cristiano Ronaldo's first goal in Real's quarterfinal win against Bayern.

BAYERN MUNICH:Arturo Vidal called Bayern Munich's 4-2 second-leg loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinals a "robbery" at the hands of referee Viktor Kassai, while adding it was the official, not Zinedine Zidane's team who had eliminated the Bundesliga leaders.

-Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer fractured his left foot in his side's 4-2 Champions League defeat against Real Madrid, that saw the Bundesliga leaders exit the competition at the quarterfinal stage in a 6-3 aggregate loss.

-Bayern attacker Thomas Muller said he felt his side had played "10 against 14" in their defeat at Real.

-Reports in Spain have alleged that police intervened after three Bayern players stormed into the referee's dressing room following their team's elimination from the Champions League.

ATLETICO MADRID:Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone admitted his team were "living in fear" of Leicester City before advancing to the Champions League semifinals 2-1 on aggregate.

LEICESTER:Jamie Vardy said he and his Leicester teammates could be proud after they gave everything in their unsuccessful bid to prolong the club's Champions League campaign on Tuesday night.

JUVENTUS:Dani Alves was back at Camp Nou on Tuesday for the first time since leaving Barcelona on a free transfer last summer, where he said a lot of things would have to change for him to ever consider returning to the club on a permanent basis.

BARCELONA:Barcelona coach Luis Enrique has advised supporters not to leave the Camp Nou after 80 minutes as he talked up his side's chances of producing another Champions League comeback against Juventus on Wednesday.

LIVERPOOL:Liverpool are not interested in signing Joe Hart from Manchester City as they consider him inferior to their current goalkeeper options, a senior Reds source has told ESPN FC.

MAN UNITED:Former Manchester United forward Federico Macheda has told La Gazzetta dello Sport he will always be grateful to Sir Alex Ferguson after finding form again with Serie B club Novara.

FIFA:Brazil's Supreme Court finally named Sport Recife the winner of the 1987 league title on Tuesday.

BRIGHTON:Brighton chairman Tony Bloom says his club will not spend "huge amounts" ahead of their first season in the Premier League.

BOURNEMOUTH:Jack Wilshere's season looks set to be over after fears he has suffered a broken leg, according to reports in several UK papers.

MLS:Construction delays will prevent MLS expansion club Atlanta United from opening Mercedes-Benz Stadium in July as planned, the team announced on Tuesday.

Follow @ESPNFC on Twitter to keep up with the latest football updates.

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Yahoo Shows Some Progress in Last Stretch as Stand-alone Company – Bloomberg

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In its final months as a standalone company, Yahoo! Inc. is showing signs it can move toward growth.

Yahoo made progress in its last quarterly earnings report before the sale of its main internet operations to Verizon Communications Inc., posting adjusted revenue and profit that topped analysts estimates. The web portal, which had said the Verizon deal would close in the current quarter, on Tuesday narrowed the time frame to June.

The sale, which comes after Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayers tumultuous tenure leading Yahoo, was threatened by two massive hacks that exposed user account data. The companies agreed to reduce the value of the deal by about $350 million in February to about $4.5 billion after the telecommunications giant had earlier suggested concessions closer to $1 billion.

As we enter our final quarter as an independent company, we are committed to finishing strong and planning for the best possible integration with Verizon, Mayer said in a statement on the results.

Revenue, excluding sales passed on to partners, was $833.8 million, compared with analysts average estimate of $814 million, according to data compiled Bloomberg. Profit, before certain items, was 18 cents a share. Analysts projected 14 cents.

Before Tuesdays announcement, the company had failed to meet estimates for revenue and adjusted earnings in four of the last nine quarterly reports.

Shares of Yahoo were little changed in extended trading after closing at $47.56 in New York.

Mayer, who arrived in July 2012 from Google to fanfare, pushed Yahoo into more mobile services and tried to attract better talent to improve products. But that never translated into much sales growth -- and early last year the company began entertaining offers that led to the Verizon deal.

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In September, investors got a surprise when Yahoo said the personal information from at least 500 million user accounts was stolen in 2014. An attack that breached the security of more than 1 billion user accounts in 2013 was revealed in December. By last month, the company said its general counsel was resigning, and Mayers compensation was trimmed. Later in March, the U.S. government accused Russia of directing some of the worlds most notorious cybercriminals to break into the web portals systems.

The acquisition offers some interesting assets for Verizon. It gets a large, mature, consumer internet service with hundreds of millions of users in areas such as video, email, news and search. The operations will become part of a unit called Oath that includes Verizons earlier acquisition of AOL, another web portal that rose to prominence in the 1990s.

Mayers focus on mobile revenue from smartphones and tablets showed positive results in the first quarter, increasing 58 percent to $412 million, the company said.

What remains are the most valuable parts of Yahoos current company: the stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Inc. and Yahoo Japan that are worth more than $40 billion. Those holdings will become part of a new company called Altaba Inc., and will be led by CEO Thomas McInerney, a current Yahoo board member.

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No progress seen on housing crunch for SF teachers – San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: at 9:55 am

Two- and three-hour daily commutes. In-law units with no kitchens. Couch surfing after an eviction.

City and district officials said they were moved by the teachers testimony and vowed to do better. They havent.

The teacher housing working group, composed of officials from the school district, teachers union and the Mayors Office of Housing, hasnt met since the hearing and has no meetings scheduled.

When they have met, sources in the room say theyre still hung up on whether its legal to build housing just for teachers under the federal Fair Housing Act. This, even though they touted former state Sen. Mark Lenos successful passage of a state bill clarifying it as legal seven months ago.

The working group has looked seriously at two school district sites for housing. One is a 2.4-acre plot at Seventh Avenue and Lawton Street thats alternately used as a pumpkin patch, Christmas tree farm and dog park. The other is the Francis Scott Key Elementary School annex on 43rd Avenue between Irving and Judah streets.

But Olson Lee, director of the Mayors Office of Housing and a member of the working group, claimed he had no idea which sites are under consideration.

For us, were working on the concept right now, irrespective of the site, he said. With a summer deadline set by Lee himself for picking the site fast approaching, being stuck in the concept stage seems problematic. Lee has also said a request for proposals to develop the site will be issued by the end of the year.

Mayor Ed Lee, who isnt a member of the working group, said the slow progress of the teacher housing project is a little frustrating.

I think we need the school district to partner with the private sector and the city in a much more deliberate, strategic way, he said.

But in a sign of how poor the lines of communication are between the school district, city and teachers union, the mayor said the union doesnt even want teacher housing.

When we asked the teachers union, they werent interested in housing just for teachers, the mayor said. Theyre about housing all over the city.

He then segued into a pitch for the inclusionary housing legislation sponsored by Supervisors London Breed and Ahsha Safai, which would allot a bigger portion of the citys subsidized units to middle-income earners making up to $126,000 for a family of three. Two married teachers with a child would qualify for help under the legislation, while they wouldnt under a competing proposal from Supervisors Jane Kim and Aaron Peskin. The latter would keep more units available for low-income earners.

Obviously, teachers cannot pay market rate, so they have to be included in inclusionary housing, the mayor said.

Matthew Hardy, spokesman for the United Educators of San Francisco, said the teachers union actually backs the Kim/Peskin proposal because it wants more of its low-income students families and low-paid classroom aides to qualify for help. Also, the union very much supports a teacher housing complex, Hardy said.

We desperately want educator housing, he said, noting he was surprised the mayor suggested otherwise.

Then Hardy had a novel suggestion. You should come in and mediate this group, he told me.

Um, no thanks. Teaching calculus to second-graders would probably be an easier task.

Its possible that teacher housing help wont come from San Francisco at all but from Sacramento. Assemblyman Evan Low, D-San Jose, was an aspiring teacher before he realized hed never be able to afford housing in that career. Now he has introduced a bill to help.

It would create and fund a pilot program for teachers in four of the most expensive counties in the state: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Clara and San Diego.

Run by the states Housing Finance Agency, the program would provide one-time down-payment assistance, up to 20 percent of the homes sales price. It would also provide rental stipends of up to $1,500 a month.

Due to be heard in the Assemblys housing committee on Wednesday, Low said teachers wouldnt start getting help for at least a year even if the bill passes.

We didnt get here overnight, and we wont fix it overnight, he said.

Lets hope this doesnt follow the timeline of teacher housing in San Francisco.

Fresh off her soda tax win in November, Supervisor Malia Cohen has a new health crusade. On Tuesday shell introduce legislation banning the sale of flavored tobacco in San Francisco.

The federal government in 2009 banned the sale of cigarettes flavored like cloves, candy or fruit. New York City has taken it further by banning the sale of flavored tobacco except for menthol cigarettes, the most popular.

Cohen wants to implement the nations strongest ban by prohibiting the sale of all flavored tobacco, including menthol cigarettes.

The tobacco industry has an established history of targeted marketing to children, young adults and people from vulnerable communities, Cohen said. They are not unlike the sugary drinks industry in this way. In fact, big soda got their playbook from big tobacco.

It seems Cohen now has a health-based playbook of her own.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Tuesdays and Fridays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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Mercedes hints at progress with tyre weakness – Eurosport.com

Posted: at 9:55 am

Valtteri Bottas takes over from Lewis Hamilton for Wednesday's running, after the Briton spent day one focusing on some new parts evaluation and tyre runs.

Mercedes is adamant that unlocking stronger pace in the race is key to it beating Ferrari, and Hamilton felt progress had been made on the opening day.

Bahrain test day one report: Hamilton fastest, more Honda strife

"Our focus was on advancing our understanding of the tyres and also the rear of the car so that we can improve our long runs - particularly during the race and on the super-soft compound," said Hamilton after his test came to an end.

"We came here with a specific goal, so it was positive to get on top of that with the team."

World championship leader Sebastian Vettel will return to normal testing duties for Ferrari on Wednesday, having spent Tuesday working on Pirelli's 2018 evaluation project.

Ferrari's challenge is slightly different from Mercedes, in that Vettel's team is on top of its race performance but has proved lacking on single-lap pace.

The team may well choose to concentrate on that because, with overtaking more difficult in 2017, not being able to control the race from the front is a disadvantage.

Pierre Gasly is taking over for Red Bull, with Daniel Ricciardo's running on Tuesday having been cut short by an engine failure.

Force India will split running between Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez as it continues work on evaluation of new parts, while Kevin Magnussen will be tasked with further work on Haas's brakes.

His team-mate Romain Grosjean, who has had strongly critical of current supplier Brembo, was encouraged by the work he did with alternative products from Carbone Industries on Tuesday.

"We still have a lot of work to do around them and see the performance, but it feels better, as it was last year," explained Grosjean on Tuesday evening.

"Otherwise it's quite similar. We just need to see if we can actually make it work with all our mapping."

When asked if he was positive enough for a switch to come in time for the next race, Grosjean said: "I think it could come for Russia. It's all ready.

"But only if we're confident that we're going to start Russia without a hitch, as you cannot miss FP1 and part of FP2 because you're not right on mapping."

McLaren will also be hoping for a better day than Tuesday, when an engine change prompted by an ERS water leak cost it hours of running and left it behind in its test programme.

Stoffel Vandoorne is taking over from Oliver Turvey for day two.

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The Trump Resistance: A Progress Report – The New Yorker – The New Yorker

Posted: at 9:55 am

The protests over President Trumps refusal to release his tax returns are the latest manifestation of a popular movement with which Republicans increasingly have to contend.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY RADHIKA CHALASANI / REDUX

Saturday was mild and cloudy in Philadelphiagood marching weather for the thousands of anti-Trump protesters who gathered at City Hall and made their way down Market Street to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. The atmosphere was upbeatfestive, almost. Many members of the crowd were carrying homemade signs, and their chants filled the spring air: What do we want? Trumps tax returns. When do we want it? Now. We want a leader, not a tax cheater. We want a leader, not a friggin tweeter.

Eighty-five days into the Trump Presidency, similar scenes played out across the country: from Los Angeles to Boston, from Seattle to Raleigh. In Palm Beach,about three thousandpeoplekicked up a racket near Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort, where the President was spending yet another weekend.

The First Golfer wasnt pleased. To avoid the protesters, one of whom was carrying a sign that said, Twinkle Twinkle Little Czar, Putin Put You Where You Are, his motorcade was forced totake a circuitous route backfrom Trump International Golf Club, where he had played his sixteenth round since taking office. (That figure comes courtesy ofa tally by the Palm Beach Post.) The following morning, Easter Sunday, Trump took to Twitter, grumbling, Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!

The protests werent small, of course, and nobody paid for them. They were the latest manifestation of a popular movement that Trump himself has inspired, one that has established itself as an important presence on the national political scene, and with which Trump and his Republican allies and enablers increasingly have to contend.

During their two-week Easter break, many G.O.P. members of Congress were confronted by constituents upset over the Republican effort to dismantle Obamacare. Politico, which dispatched reporters to nearly a dozen town-hall meetings, reported, for example, that the Colorado representative Mike Coffman, a relative moderate, wasconfronted by a lifelong Republicanwho demanded that he commit to limiting premiums for people with prexisting conditions. In Graniteville, South Carolina, a crowd chanted You lie! at Joe Wilson, theRepublican congressman who famously shouted out the same phrase duringa 2009 address to Congress by former President Obama.

Of course, most of the people who are marching and protesting at Republican events might not be G.O.P. voters. But they arent all Democratic activists, either. Indeed, what is striking is how many people Trump has mobilized who previously didnt pay very much attention to what happens in Washington. He has politicized many formerly apolitical people; ultimately, this may be among his biggest achievements as President.

At anti-Trump rallies, the organizers tend to be activists, but the protesters are of all sorts: college graduates outraged by Trumps nativism; office workersangry that he wont release his tax returns; doctors and nurses worried about the health-care system; retirees worried about their grandkids; and Americans from all walks of life who think that Trump isnt fit for office and represents a grave danger to the country.

The troubles that Trump has encountered in office, far from diminishing the protest movement, have only encouraged itand for good reason. If the past three months have demonstrated anything, it is that, even in a political system tainted by money and influence-peddling, political participation does matter. Federal officials, judges, Democratic and Republican congressmen, even Trump himselfthey all pay attention to public activism and public opinion.

Take the Administrations two attempts to enact an anti-Muslim travel ban. Would the federal courts have blocked the measures without the mass protests that the first ban engendered? Or recall the Ryan-Trump health-care bill. While the defectionsof the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus played a big role in the bills failure, so did the protests at G.O.P. town-hall meetings and the campaign to highlight how the measure would undercut affordable coveragefor the old and sick.

These were two successes for the anti-Trump forces, as was the downgrading of Steve Bannon, the White Houses chief political strategist. To the extent that the goal of the resistance is to make sure the checks and balances in the American political system work as intended, and to prevent the emergence of an overweening Presidency, or a potential despot, it seems to be succeeding. Although Trump would never admit that he is backtracking, he has been forced to make some concessions to reality.But there is no room for complacency. Far from it.

Despite the tax-day protests, the President has no intention of releasing his returns, much less of setting up a proper blind trust for his business assets, or of separating his family from the conduct of government. Inside the White House, he appears to be relying more and more on his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Elsewhere in government, as theTimesreported over the weekend, he is busy installing former lobbyiststo oversee their former clients.

In many policy areas, the Trump Administration remains determined to roll back the clock in ways that will be difficult to stop. Protest marches wont prevent the E.P.A. from whittling away at environmental regulations, the Justice Department from failing to enforce civil-rights laws, or the National Labor Relations Board from ruling in favor of big businesses.

Then there is Trump himself. Throughout his career, he has shown a willingness to do virtually anything, and to take huge risks, to protecthis position. There is no reason to expect anything different now. In the past couple of weeks, he has pivoted to national security, ordered the bombing of Syria, presided over the detonation in Afghanistan of one of the biggest conventional weapons in the U.S. arsenal, and made threatening noises toward North Korea.

In foreign policy, unfortunately, Presidents are given wide latitude.Particularly during crises, Congress tends to defer to the Commander-in-Chief, and the judiciary cant pullhim back from the brink. But there is still the right to protest. And this seems like a good time for some peace rallies.

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Williams: Black progress overlooked for political correctness … – Amarillo.com

Posted: at 9:55 am

As a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains - over some of the highest hurdles and in a very short span of time - of any racial group in mankinds history. Whats the evidence?

If one totaled up the earnings of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank among the 20 richest nations. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who once headed the worlds mightiest military. Black Americans are among the worlds most famous personalities, and a few are among the worlds richest people.

The significance of these and other achievements is that at the end of the Civil War, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in a little over a century - if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people.

Just as importantly, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on the face of the earth would such progress be possible except in the United States of America. The big and thorny issue that confronts our nation is how these gains can be extended to the one-third or more of the black population for whom they have proved elusive.

A major part of the solution should be the elimination of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know that they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior.

The poverty rate among blacks is about 30 percent. Its seen as politically correct to blame todays poverty on racial discrimination, but thats nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black intact husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Does one want to argue that racists discriminate against female-headed families but not husband-and-wife families?

Education is one of the ways out of poverty, but stupid political correctness stands in the way for many blacks. For example, a few years ago, a white Charleston, South Carolina, teacher frequently complained of black students calling her a white b, white m-f-, white c- and white ho. School officials told her that racially charged profanity was simply part of the students culture and that if she couldnt handle it, she was in the wrong school. The teacher brought a harassment suit, and the school district settled out of court for $200,000.

To suggest that such disrespectful and violent behavior, though its observed in many predominantly black schools, is part of black culture is an insulting lie. Worse than that is the fact that such destructive behavior and lack of respect for authority is rewarded. We can see some of the results by visiting some city public schools where violence, disorder and disrespect is the order of the day.

Many whites are ashamed and saddened by our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. As a result, they often hold blacks accountable to standards and conduct they would never accept from whites.

A recent example is black students at colleges such as NYU, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Oberlin demanding racially segregated housing. Spineless college administrators have caved to their demands. These administrators would never even listen to a group of white students demanding white-only housing accommodations. These administrators and other guilt-ridden whites have one standard of conduct for whites and a lower standard for blacks.

Black people can be thankful that racist forms of double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not broadly accepted during the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. There would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the worlds most successful civil rights movement.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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The Ghost in the Ghost – lareviewofbooks

Posted: at 9:54 am

APRIL 17, 2017

FREUD TOLD US that one of the most unsettling effects for human ontology is to be confronted by a machine that comes to life. In this, he was but echoing what was already a century-long anxiety about the limits and definitions of the human since the beginning of the machine age. Rupert Sanderss new film Ghost in the Shell, based on the 1995 cult classic anime of the same name by Mamoru Oshii, based on the manga by Shirow Masamune, and following a long line of cinematic cyber-fiction from Blade Runner to Ex Machina, extends this apprehension about the animation of the inanimate and asks all of the expected (and, dare I say, tired) questions: What makes a human human? Is consciousness the same as the soul? Is there a ghost in the machine? Is artificial intelligence an enhancement or an erasure of the human? What happens to the human element when the brain gets reduced to a series of electrical impulses, and, conversely, along a more sentimental line, can machines have feelings, too?

Raising these questions has become a convention of the cyber-fiction genre; so, too, has the deployment of femininity and racial otherness as gratuitous and exotic titillation. Reviews of Sanderss film have already noted the voyeuristic pleasures afforded by a naked Scarlett Johansson, who plays Major Motoko Kusanagi, an augmented cybernetic cop who is not shy about exposing her wholly synthetic body. Many have chided the movie for its appropriative uses of Asiatic things and persons as exotic decor, and all seem to agree that the casting of Johansson as Kusanagi was a form of commercial whitewashing, if not downright whiteface. But a film like Ghost in the Shell should raise questions for us about the relationship between surface and embodiment, especially what that relationship really entails for raced and gendered subjects.

Ghost in the Shell, along with the genre of cyberpunk with its techno-Orientalism, itself a reboot of 19th-century Orientalism, gives us the opportunity to consider an alternative logic of American racial embodiment. Dichotomies like authenticity versus artificiality, interiority versus surface, ghost versus shell, organic humanness versus synthetic assemblage simply do not help us address the uncanny materialization of race and gender. The peculiar thing about Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination is that it has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence:

The conflation of Asiatic femininity and artificiality reaches from Plato through Oscar Wilde and can be seen in Art Nouveau, French Symbolism, all the way up to wide-ranging versions in the 21st century. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an (if not the) original cyborg.

It is easy to mourn the loss of humanity in a figure like this or, conversely, to celebrate its triumphant posthumanism, but it is much harder and, I would argue, much more urgent to dwell with the discomfort of undeniable human alterity, a figure who does not let us forget that the human has always been embroiled with the inhuman well before the threat of the modern machine. In this light, racial logic as this strange embodiment-that-is-also-not-enfleshment haunts Ghost in the Shell, playing itself out compulsively on the surfaces of the film: in the flickering holograms of the mise-en-scne, on the hygienic surfaces of the Frankensteinian lab, and on the skin of our heroine. It is not a coincidence that the most visually arresting and most philosophically suggestive element in the film is the Majors epidermis: an arresting combination of resilient matter and willful transparency; seamed yet seamless; a unified collation of fragmented and variegated nudes; a bareness that is also armor. The Majors supra-human and sartorial skin exemplifies pure impenetrable technology, but it also carries the unseen, porous, and fractured history of human labor, by which I do not mean the delicate hands of her scientist-surgeon creator but the laboring race-body underlying the slave logic of the cyborg. Thus the very surface of Johansson/Majors white, inorganic, impeccable, and implacable skin, precisely as cladding, enacts, counterintuitively, a deep dive into Asiatic femininity. She is the 21st-century technological shell encasing the traumatic kernel of Euro-American imperialism and racial history. (Let us not forget that the Major is the product/daughter of an American industrial giant heralding high-tech progress in a corporate conglomerate-state called Japan.)

If one of the global inhuman humans that emerged out of Western imperial history was the Chinese coolie (a male laboring body mythologized as infinitely capable of enduring pain, mechanical, an ideal laborer), and if one of the other inhuman human figures arising out of the 19th century was the Oriental woman (a female, decorative, disposable toy for leisure), then we can think of the Major as the merging of both: a body of labor and numb endurance, but also a smooth beauty that bears the lines of its own wreckage, a delicacy that is also impermeable and insensate. Throughout most of the film, the protagonist played by Johansson is simply named the Major; Sanders suppresses for most of the film the original anime characters full (and explicitly Japanese) name. This may abet the whitewashing, but it also has the opposite effect of punching up the big reveal at the end the disclosure that Majors white body has been playing host to Kusanagis Japanese brain by fulfilling a racial logic that has been implicit all along.

In the original anime series, the most chilling philosophic proposition is not that machines and cyborgs can be hijacked but that human consciousness can be hacked. In Sanderss film version, the pathos of the human as vulnerable-yet-mechanical is augmented by precisely the spectral evocation of Asiatic femininity, the imaginary engine that switches between the thingness of persons and the personness of things. The film may tell a cautionary tale about how people have been turned into things; consider this memorable line spoken to our cyborg heroine: They did not save your life; they stole it. But the history of Orientalism in the West is not just a history of objectification but also a history of personification: the making of personness out of things. This Non-Person, normally seen as outside of modernity and opposite to organic human individualism, actually embodies a forgotten genealogy about the coming together of life and nonlife, labor and style, which conditions the modern conceit of humanness.

As the scientists in Ghost in the Shell keep telling us, the Major is the great hope, the success story, the Eve for the future. Repeatedly touted as unique, though we discover the opposite, the Major stands as a singularity that is serial: a shell born out of many other shells. When the Major looks into the face of a geisha-robot-assassin in a barely disguised mirror scene, her comrade Batou (Pilou Asbk) is quick to assure her of a distinction, You are not like that. But we suspect that what is being disavowed here is precisely the complex and messy interpenetrations of race, gender, and machine. Being a cyborg and a hybrid being, the Major is exactly like the robot: Asiatic, other, alien. And this condition of otherness is, paradoxically, the alibi for, and the residue of, her humanity. Race and femininity are the supplements that enable this toggle between the human and the inhuman to emerge.

We have arrived at a double-edged sword: racial and gender differences entail a history of profound dehumanization; at the same time, they have also provided the most powerful and affective agents for humanizing the dreams of synthetic inventions.

What is inside the machine? The yellow woman: the ghost within the ghost. The biographical revelation at the end of Ghost in the Shell is but a literalization of this insight. This is also why the Asiatic woman can play double roles: simultaneously atavistic (the geisha, the slave girl) and futuristic (the automaton, the cyborg). The artificiality of Asiatic femininity is the ancient dream that feeds the machine in the heart of modernity.

Anne Anlin Cheng is professor of English and director of American Studies at Princeton University.She is the author ofThe Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden GriefandSecond Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface.

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