Director Matt Reeves explained that a world ruled by apes is, understandably, kind of complex.
By Kevin P. Sullivan, with reporting by Josh Horowitz
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1710952/comic-con-planet-of-the-apes.jhtml
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WASHINGTON -- Michigan?s Republican governor said Sunday he does not expect -- or necessarily want -- a federal bailout of Detroit as the city struggles to provide services and pay pensions for city workers after becoming the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy.
Gov. Rick Snyder pledged that city operations would continue, but he sought to lower expectations that Washington might step in to save the iconic American city. In 2009, the federal government intervened to rescue much of the U.S. auto industry, which is headquartered in Detroit.
The bankruptcy filing ?is a very tragic situation, and this was a very difficult decision, but it's the right one,? Snyder said on ?Face the Nation.?
?If the federal government wants to do that, that's their option,? he said, referring to a bailout. ?The way I view it is I want to partner with all levels of government to stay focused on services to citizens.?
Some have compared the city?s plight to that of a natural disaster, worthy of federal intervention.
But the city?s mayor, David Bing, said Sunday that ?it's very difficult right now to ask directly for support.?
?Now that we've done our bankruptcy filing, I think we've got to take a step back and see what's next,? Bing said on ?This Week with George Stephanopoulos. ?There's a lot of conversation, a lot of planning, a lot of negotiations that will go into fixing our city.?
Vice President Joe Biden said last week it was unclear whether the federal government could play any role in helping Detroit provide services or pay its retirees.
Federal law governing municipal bankruptcies does not provide for the kind of quick restructuring that occurred in the auto industry rescue. Moreover, a federal bailout of Detroit would probably require legislation passed by Congress, which seems almost impossible in the current political environment.
Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy last week after Snyder?s appointed turnaround expert, Kevyn Orr, said there was no other alternative. Decades of falling population and fiscal mismanagement, he said, had left the city $18 billion in debt.
The once-thriving home of the U.S. automotive industry has seen its population drop steadily for more than half a century, to 700,000 now from more than 1.8 million at its peak in 1950, leaving the city struggling to provide police, fire and general services across a huge metropolis now pocked with vacant lots and swaths of abandoned buildings.
Orr, who represented Chrysler during its successful restructuring, said the city had few expectations that a federal bailout was coming from Washington.
?We are not expecting the cavalry to come charging in,? Orr said on ?Fox News Sunday.? ?We are out here on outpost and we have to fix it because we dug the hole. And that's the assumption that we are operating on, on how we're going forward.?
Some 30,000 current and retired city workers face a future with reduced pensions. Basic city services exist, but not at ?normal? levels, Snyder said.
At the same time, what to do with decayed structures of Detroit?s core have been a subject of both economic and artistic scrutiny.
Pension liabilities make up the bulk of Detroit?s debt, and Orr, who has been the city?s emergency financial manager for the past four months, said there would likely be changes in the payments retired city workers receive.
?There are going to be some adjustments,? Orr said on ?Fox News Sunday.? ?We don't have a choice. We've crossed the Rubicon on the level -- we have $18-plus billion -- $18 billion to $19 billion in debt and no funding mechanism for it.?
The path forward, however, remained uncertain after a judge in Michigan on Friday ordered a halt to the bankruptcy proceedings, saying they violated the state?s constitution, which bars reductions in public pensions. The state?s attorney general vowed to appeal.
The battle over funding the city?s pensions may reverberate in other troubled cities, including California?s Stockton and San Bernardino, which have also filed for bankruptcy protection.
lisa.mascaro@latimes.com
Twitter: @LisaMascaroinDC
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By Piya Sinha-Roy
SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - "Superman" director Zack Snyder said on Saturday that a sequel to last month's hit film was not only in the works, but would feature two of DC Comic's best-known caped crusaders - Superman versus Batman.
Snyder, who directed British actor Henry Cavill as Superman/Clark Kent, surprised the audience with the news at the end of a Warner Bros. film panel at San Diego's Comic-Con, an annual comics convention, and received thunderous applause from the 6,000-plus in attendance.
The sequel to the latest Superman film, "Man of Steel," is banking on the success of recent comic-book films that have paired up heroes from the comic book universe, such as Disney's Marvel superhero ensemble "The Avengers" in 2012, which made $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office.
The most recent installment of the Batman franchise, 2012's "The Dark Knight Rises," directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, has made more than $1 billion at the global box office.
"Superman" has not always seen success at the box office and 2006's sequel starring Brandon Routh did not perform up to industry expectations.
But Snyder's darker reimagining of the complex superhero in June's "Man of Steel" delivered a strong performance at the box office with $621 million worldwide. With Nolan as executive producer of the film, rumors were circulating that a pairing of Batman and Superman could come to the big screen.
Cavill is expected to reprise the role of Superman but there was no word on who would play Batman. Bale has previously shot down rumors that he would play the masked hero again.
Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc, showcased a number of upcoming films on Saturday at Comic-Con, including "Seventh Son," "300: Rise of an Empire," "Godzilla" and "The Lego Movie," which will bring together Superman and Batman in animated Lego form.
(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Mary Milliken and Eric Beech)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/batman-battle-superman-sequel-warner-bros-unites-franchises-224522526.html
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But there are few options out there that can meet Hyperloop's promised velocity. Ordinary magnetic levitation (maglev) trains like Japan's speed demons can't do much better than 300 to 350 mph?above that speed the air resistance is simply too great. The proposed technology that seems closest to Musk's promise is the vactrain, a marvel that has been promised for decades and never come close to fruition.
Where Musk appears to be aiming for 600 to 700 mph, Vactrain backers like Evacuated Tube Transport seek to send passengers screaming along at speeds up to 4000 mph, fast enough to fling them cross-country in 45 minutes or from New York to Beijing in the time it takes to watch a movie. This sick speed is possible by combining frictionless maglev travel and tunnels maintained in a vacuum state so that train cars travel with essentially no resistance. Engineers have toyed with this idea for a century, and got serious about it in the 1970s, but today they are merely in an experimental, regional stage.
Musk has said his system is not based upon such a vacuum. Instead, it appears that his creation might resemble a long skinny loop with air continuously circulated at ludicrous speeds?perhaps like the pneumatic tube that uses compressed air to send mail zipping around a post office. (Here's a 1957 PopMech story in which the company Honeywell predicted pneumatic tube travel by the year 2000.) Here's the diagram, by John Gardi, that Musk has called the best guess so far as to what he's up to:
Pneumatic tube transport for humans or vehicles is a staple of sci-fi, but like vactrains, it has yet to become a reality. And many of the same problems that have plagued vactrain dreamers also present major obstacles for any high-speed, long-distance train transit system, including Hyperloop.
Building
Whatever solution a super-high-speed train uses to overcome air resistance, the first major issue is just having enough power to keep it going, says John Mansman, MIT engineering professor and transportation expert. In the case of a vactrain, he says, "just the electrical cost of keeping [the vacuum] evacuated in not trivial"?constantly pumping air would probably require more energy than operating the maglev system itself.
What about Musk's train? If speculation is correct that Hyperloop will keep air cycling through the system at hundreds of miles per hour, then the mechanics of keeping that air blowing won't be cheap, either. And don't forget the maintenance costs of either A) a vactrain having to keep hundreds of miles of vacuum tunnel leak-proof, or B) maintaining the "air hockey" part of Musk's system?the column of air needed to propel the train through the straightaway.
Rights
A tunnel between L.A. and San Francisco will pass under a lot of private and public land. And at 600 mph, the train can't zigzag around places where owners didn't agree to sell their rights. Those cars have got to go in a straight line. (The Verge reports that Hyperloop would have a turning radius of 40 miles.)
Jim LaRusch, attorney for the American Public Transportation Association, says this is an illustration of why huge transportation projects are typically government-funded, or at least have the government as a partner: It's much, much easier to get the rights in order. For example, in parts of California, LaRusch says, the government can reimburse utilities if a utility must move its underground infrastructure to make way for a tunnel. A private firm is on its own. "There's got to be somebody with a sewer, or a cable line, or something in the way," he says.
In Musk's case, he's fortunate to be building Hyperloop within one state and avoiding the legal tangle of trying to secure rights across states, as a nation-spanning vactrain would have to do?states and cities have a hodgepodge of different laws covering these property rights.
Still, LaRusch says, the rights question is an open one, especially if Musk isn't working with the State of California. "It's not really been tested," he says. "Not a lot of people have tried it without a government piece." Even the transcontinental railroad of the 1800s, perhaps the closest analog to a nation-spanning underground rail, was possible only because of using government land grants to the rail companies, LaRusch says.
From the December 1957 PopMech.
Safety
What happens when a train that uses electric power to brake is traveling hundreds or thousands of miles per hour and the power goes out? "The thing is then scraping along the bottom of the track at [incredible speeds]," Mansman says. That's why backup power, and using any means necessary to avoid a blackout, is so important for a super-high-speed train.
"The trains have to be space vehicles," Mansman says of vactrain systems, because sending humans flying through a vacuum tunnel in a pressurized can at thousands of miles per hour presents a few key safety challenges. First, the train has to be able to withstand extreme deceleration in the case of an emergency stop?riders must be able to survive a bump off the wall and a hard slowdown. Second, the train car can't suffer any leaks even in a crash, since it's sitting in a vacuum tunnel. Third, Mansman says, the car needs to have a sufficient backup oxygen system in case it takes a long time for crews to rescue the vactrain passengers. "You're stopped 500 miles from the nearest station, with limited oxygen," he says, and letting air back into such a huge system could take hours.
Here Musk would have a leg up. Hyperloop would avoid the dangers of air supply if it's not a vacuum system. Musk still must account for the risk of an accident at 600-plus mph, however statistically low it might be, but the "loop" part of Hyperloop's design would mean there's no hard terminus to worry about.
Money
Simply, enormous underground rail costs a fortune. "There's not a basic physics issue," Mansman says. Super-high-speed trains can be built?it's a matter of making the business case for them.
Just building the Chunnel 30 miles between England and France cost several billion dollars, he points out. The trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles is more than 10 times as far, never mind crossing the country or the ocean as an even more ambitious system might. "It's how you build up infrastructure over the distances that are important," he says.
We'll see what Musk says about the dollars and cents in August.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/genes/~3/Do8rnxvf5eU/130719083921.htm
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Spencer Platt / Getty Images file
Once American?s third-largest city, Detroit?s population has fallen by a quarter since 2000. A shrinking population further erodes the tax base, intensifying the budget squeeze.
With its bankruptcy filing, the city of Detroit has entered uncharted territory. It's a dark place that no major U.S. city has ever gone ? but that could change.
Despite the uncertainties surrounding what?s expected to be a hard fought legal battle, the outcome promises to inflict more pain on Detroit?s already-beleaguered city workers, residents, businesses, creditors and investors.
The case will also set a legal precedent that will be watched closely by other major cities across the country struggling under the weight of years of accumulated debt and underfunded pensions covering millions of public sector retirees.
"Everyone will say, 'Oh well, it?s Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,' " said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone.
Read more: Detroit becomes largest city to file for bankruptcy
"But Detroit is not unique. It?s the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It?s a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems.?
The bankruptcy filing follows a decades-long decline of a city that prospered through much of the last century as the capital of U.S. manufacturing. But as that industrial base has declined, so too have the city?s fortunes.
Detroit has endured booms and busts in the past. But even as the auto industry has roared back to life since the Great Recession, the economic recovery has left the Motor City in its rearview mirror.
Though unemployment has fallen from a peak of nearly 28 percent in 2009, some 16.3 percent of Detroit workers are still without a paycheck. As a result, income tax revenues have fallen 30 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, the national recovery in home prices has yet to spread to Detroit. Property taxes are 20 percent lower than 2008 levels.
As tax revenues have shrunk, the cost of maintaining city services has grown. Tens of thousands of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, and a resulting increase in fires and crime, have increased the burden on firefighters and police. Forty percent of the city?s streetlights don?t work.
?There?s no way Detroit can afford to service 140 square miles anymore,? said Scorsone. ?So for parts of the city, if your streetlight?s out, they?re not going to fix it. If your road has massive potholes, it?s going to turn it to gravel. It?s that stark.?
Many residents have responded by simply moving away. America?s fourth-largest city from the 1920s to the 1940s, Detroit?s population has further fallen by a quarter since 2000. A shrinking population further erodes the tax base, intensifying the budget squeeze.
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As tax revenues have shrunk, the city?s financial obligations have grown ? mainly to an ever-expanding pool of 30,000 retirees, promised life-time pensions and health benefits by short-sighted government officials over decades who consistently failed to fund those future obligations. The city now owes more than $18 billion ? roughly $25,000 for every resident.
Union officials, who have vowed to fight any effort to reduce benefits to retirees and vested workers, claim the city has undermined the pension fund by outsourcing city services to workers who don?t pay into the system.
"As older people leave the workforce, the city has been privatizing those jobs instead of bringing people back in to pay into the fund,? said Ed McNeil, special assistant to the president of Michigan AFSCME Council 25, which represents city workers.
Union officials also argue the city is owed hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes that should be collected before retirees are asked to take a cut in benefits.
?If they went after that money, they could pay their debts,? said McNeil.
Investors holding Detroit?s bonds have already taken a hit as the steady erosion of the city?s finances has slashed the city's credit rating to junk status. Last month, Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy lawyer named to restructure Detroit?s debts, declared a ?moratorium? on some interest payments.
In the days leading up to Thursday?s bankruptcy filing, Orr had been working with individual creditors to renegotiate those debts at a dime a dollar.
That could help close the gaping financial hole in the short run. But inflicting too much pain on bondholders could have dire long term consequences, according to Kim Rueben, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who specializes in municipal finance.
?You don?t want to have to do that because you want to keep your ability to borrow again to rebuild your city,? she said.
Orr must now convince a bankruptcy judge to invalidate the city?s pension contracts, freeing him to reduce payments to retirees. The unions' lawyers will argue that pension and health benefits are protected by Michigan?s constitution, one of seven states that specifically ban cuts in retiree pension and benefit payments.
That?s why the case will be closely watched by states like Illinois and California, which also have badly underfunded their pensions. If Detroit is allowed to cut payments to its retirees, city and state workers in those states and others could see their future benefits pared back.
Future public sector workers can all but count on lower retirement benefits, as many state and local governments scale back the kind of financial promises that sank Detroit. With retirees living longer, those promises have become too costly to make.
?I think there is going to need to be an understanding with public employees that working for 30 years and being able to have a pension for that much time or longer is not sustainable,? Rueben said.
The crisis is also being watched closely in the White House.
?The President and members of the President?s senior team continue to closely monitor the situation in Detroit," Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, said. "While leaders on the ground in Michigan and the city?s creditors understand that they must find a solution to Detroit?s serious financial challenge, we remain committed to continuing our strong partnership with Detroit as it works to recover and revitalize and maintain its status as one of America's great cities.?
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