122.66 to $3

You Sitting in Beijing Traffic? Big Brother is WatchingThe news was packaged innocuously enough. In order to alleviate Beijing’s horrible traffic jams, a new project called the Dynamic Information Platform for Public Travel would use residents’ cellphones to track where they were and figure out how to make traffic flow more smoothly. The People’s Daily, the Chinese government’s mouthpiece, had this to say, in its ever fluid prose:“The deputy director of the [Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission] Li Guoguang said that this platform is to utilize cellular location technology through 17 million China Mobile cell phone users to obtain real-time information on their activities. It is available to acquire living and working situations for residents, which will give the government a leg up to grasp a precise understanding of the population distribution and flow distribution at different times at selected areas.“By sending dynamic travel information to citizens, they can adjust their trip plan in downtown areas to effectively relieve traffic congestion”,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin sale[/url], the official said.“It is also fairly beneficial for population management,” Li said,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin outlet[/url], “Information obtained through the mobile phone location is more thoroughly in terms of figuring out the population of a certain dwelling district.”All of us who have idled in Beijing’s notorious traffic should be ecstatic to hear that something is being done about the Chinese capital’s bumper-to-bumper jams. But think again about the spooky implications. The Beijing government has just announced that it will be using cellphones to monitor in real time, every person’s whereabouts. Does that strike you as just a teeny bit alarming?Journalists and dissidents know to turn off their phones when out on sensitive missions, lest the police follow them using their mobile signals. But most Chinese probably aren’t quite aware how their Nokias or Iphones act as honing devices. Given the Beijing authorities’ iron-fisted response to the non-event that was China’s Jasmine Revolution, one can only imagine how avidly any cluster of mobile phones will be followed by the local police. Of course, there may be comic implications: Is that throng of cellphones in a busy commercial area of Beijing an incipient protest against the government? Or is it just a line of people at a particularly popular hotpot restaurant? Luckily for the Public Security Bureau folks, they have the means to investigate—and they’re not shy in telling us just how easily they can track us down.Hey,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin men[/url], They Were Listening: Some Banks Reinstate Free CheckingConsumers love to gripe about the scarcity of free checking and ever-increasing bank fees. But something funny happened in the second half of 2011 that belies the narrative of being nickel-and-dimed by the big banks: The availability of free checking, as well as minimum balance requirements and maintenance fees, actually inched down. It appears some banks blinked, abandoning fee hikes in the face of a backlash defined by protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and Bank Transfer Day.A new survey of checking accounts at 100 large and medium-sized institutions conducted by MoneyRates.com found that roughly 39% of them have no monthly maintenance fees, a jump of about 4 percentage points from just six months earlier. Back in the relative good ol’ days of mid 2010, around 44% of checking accounts were free. But this recent trend, while a step in the right direction, doesn’t indicate a complete reversal.For accounts that do charge maintenance fees, these amounts have inched down slightly, although they’re still high at an average of $11.28 per month, a drop of about 50 cents from mid-2011. For some perspective, that average was a relatively paltry $5.90 at the end of 2009.(MORE: More Fees, Fewer Branches As Banks Cope With Lower Profits)Minimum balance requirements to have those maintenance fees waived have come down more significantly since midyear,http://www.xirland.com, from $4,122.66 to $3,590.83. That’s still a lot of money to keep locked

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