#generates almost $2 trillion per year

[mightyflamethrower]

Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

At the same time, to vie for a shrinking number of students, colleges began offering costly in loco parentis counseling, Club Med-style dorms and accommodations, and extracurricular activities.

As applicants grew scarcer and expenses went up, universities began offering “full-service” student-aid packages, heavily reliant on government-subsidized student loans. The collective indebtedness of over 40 million student borrowers is nearing $2 trillion.

Worse still, an entire new array of therapeutic majors and minors appeared in the social sciences. Most of these gender/race/environmental courses did not emphasize analytical, mathematical, or oral and written skills. Such course work did not impress employers.

Faculty hiring had become increasingly non-meritocratic based on diversity/equity/inclusion criteria. New faculty hires have sought to institutionalize self-serving DEI and recalibrate higher education to prepare a new generation for self-perpetuating radical ideologies.

At the more elite campuses, racial quotas vastly curtailed the number of Asian and white students. But that racialist social engineering project required dropping the SAT requirement and comparative ranking of high school grade point averages.

As less well-prepared students entered college, faculty either inflated grades (80 percent are A/A- now at Yale), watered down their course requirements, or added new soft-ball classes. To do otherwise while attempting to retain old standards earned targeted faculty charges of racism and worse.

Another way to square the circle of rising costs and fewer and poorer students was to attract foreign students. They pay the full costs of college, especially those on generous stipends from the Middle East and China. Nearly a million foreign nationals, the majority from illiberal regimes, are now here on full scholarships.

While here, many see their newfound freedoms as invitations to attack America. Once here, they too often romanticize the very autocratic governments and illiberal values of their homelands that they seemingly sought to escape by coming to America.

Most foreign students assume they are exempt from the consequences of violating campus rules or laws in general. After all, they pay the full cost of their education and thus partially subsidize those who do not.

Almost half of all those enrolled in college never graduate. Those who do, on average, require six years to do so.

All these realities explain why teenagers increasingly opt for trade schools, vocational education, and community colleges. They prefer to enter the work force largely debt-free and in demand as skilled, sought-after tradespeople.

Most feel that if the old general education curriculum has been destroyed at weaponized universities, then there is no great loss in skipping the traditional BA degree. A far better selection of demanding and well-taught classes can be found online at a lower cost.

The result is a disaster for both higher education and a wake-up call for the country at large.

Entire generations are now suffering from prolonged adolescence as they drag out college to consume their early and mid-twenties. The unfortunate result for the country is a radical delay in marriage, childbearing, and home ownership—all the time-honored catalysts for adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it.

Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. A degree from Columbia no longer guarantees either maturity or preeminent knowledge but is just as likely a warning to employers of a noisy, poorly educated graduate more eager to complain to Human Resources than to enhance a company’s productivity.

Yet it may not be all that unfortunate that much of higher education is going the way of malls, movie theaters, and CDs. The country needs far more skilled physical labor and less prolonged adolescence and debt.

STEM courses, professional schools, and traditional campuses are better insulated from mediocrity and should survive. Otherwise, millions more starting adulthood at 18 debt-free and fewer encumbered, ignorant, and entitled at 25 is not a bad thing for the country.

[iraempirecom]

Edward Jones Revenue

What is Edward Jones?

Edward Jones is a complete brokerage company with offices in the United States & Canada. The organization was first established in St. Louis in the year 1922. Throughout the twentieth century, it set an excellent track record as among the most renowned investors, investing extensively in its clients.

This company launched its first activities in the United States before moving into Canada. Edward Jones claims that there are around 15,000 locations. It employs around 19,000 professional and knowledgeable financial advisors. The diversity of goods is quite astounding, which is owing to the company's goal of engaging every client. Edward Jones, the founder of Edward Jones Investments, is an established name in the financial platform and he is mostly the reason why this company is still thriving after a century of trading. The business has served about 7 million clients and has $1.7 trillion in AUM (Asset Under Management). The firm focuses primarily on future investment prospects. For a detailed overview of the company, read: Edward Jones review.

People Behind Edward Jones: CEOWhat is the management team behind Edward Jones?

Edward Jones' management team includes 19,000 financial advisors. Penny Pennington is the Managing Partner in the organization. Managing Partner at Edward Jones Investments: Penny Pennington

Penny Pennington joined the firm as the sixth managing partner and leads the organization through purpose-driven culture renewal, strategic transformation, leader-leading methods, and team supervision. Penny Pennington claims she starts working for the company as a financial advisor in 2000. In 2006, she was promoted to principal. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia & an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Edward Jones Revenue

What is the Edward Jones Revenue? Edward Jones' annual revenue is roughly $10.2 billion. As per Zippia's study and research, the science team discovered the following important concept of financial metrics concerning the firm, Edward Jones. - In 2022, Edward Jones' peak revenue was roughly $10.2 billion. - Edward Jones employs 49,000 people and generates $207,448 in revenue per employee. (source)

Our top companies have a spotless record and they do not involved in any major legal battles. You can check out the list here.

Why Are Investors Diversifying Their Portfolio?

Experts agree that the financial market is now even more fragile than pre-2008. Will your retirement portfolio weather the imminent financial crisis? Threats are many. Pick your poison..

The financial system would be in great peril if one or more big banks fail. "When we get to a downturn, banks won't have the cushion to absorb the losses. Without a cushion, we will have 2008 and 2009 again."

Student debt, which has been on a steep rise for years, could figure greatly in the next credit downturn. "There are parallels to 2008: There are massive amounts of unaffordable loans being made to people who can't pay them"

The US national debt has spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months! "If we keep throwing gas on flames with deficit spending, I worry about how severe the next downturn is going to be--and whether we have enough bullets left ,"

Total household debt rose to an all-time high of $13.67 trillion at year-end 2019. "Any type of secured lending backed by an asset that is overvalued should be a concern… that is what happened with housing." Get in touch with an expert using the button down below:

How much Money does Edward Jones make in a day?

In one day, Edward Jones earns almost $27.8 million. Edward Jones often generates nearly $847.1 million in sales in just one month. For the 11th Successive Year, Edward Jones has been Named to the Fortune 500 List Cision Newswire claims that for the 11th successive year, Edward Jones appears on the Fortune 500 list. "Edward Jones is ranked 333rd, having over $12.3 billion in net revenue projected for 2022, said Cision PR Newswire. " Managing Partner of Edward Jones Penny Pennington said, almost 19,000 financial advisors assist more than 8 million customers, with 73% of them receiving comprehensive service.

You can get a free guide on gold IRAs below. It will help you understand the process:

Is Edward Jones Legit? Should You Invest With Them?Is Edward Jones a scam or legit? Are they worth it?

No one, in my opinion, needs to invest in them. It is not as reliable as it markets itself to be. Customers have conflicting feelings about the organization. Nonetheless, they are at the center of numerous lawsuits alleging unconstitutional discrimination. Making any final selections, I recommend that you research the finest gold IRA providers. There, you will learn about the best deals on the market and ensure you make the best decision. Investing in precious metals can seem difficult. To help you find the best precious metals provider, we have created our top gold IRA companies list.  You can check it out to see what the industry’s best has to offer.  On the other hand, you can view the top supplier in your state below: Read the full article

[cyberbenb]

Ukraine war latest: Russia’s war costs Ukraine $50 billion annually, PM says

Key developments on Aug. 3:

PM says war cost Ukraine over $50 billion

Interior Ministry identifies over 230,000 alleged Russian war criminals, collaborators

Czech-made components found in Russian kamikaze drone

Russia launches 15 kamikaze drones, 47 airstrikes over 24 hours

Russian attack injures 8, including 4 emergency workers in Kherson

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Aug. 3 that the war costs Ukraine around Hr 1.8 trillion ($50 billion) per year.

“This is more than the peacetime’s budget revenue,” said Shmyhal, referring to the 2021 budget. According to the prime minister, Ukraine’s budget revenue in 2021 was around $48 billion.

Nearly 50% of the country’s budget is now subsidized by Ukraine’s foreign partners, with the U.S., and EU being the main backers.

The EU disbursed another $1.65 billion (1.5 billion euros) of macro-financial assistance to keep Ukraine’s services and infrastructure afloat, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on June 22.

The European Commission has pledged to provide financial support of up to $54.7 billion (50 billion euros) to Ukraine from 2024 to 2027.

This funding aims to ensure macro-financial stability, facilitate recovery and reconstruction efforts, and promote the modernization of the country while implementing crucial reforms on the EU integration track.

Meanwhile, the Kyiv School of Economics estimated on Aug. 2 that the Russian full-scale invasion caused over $150 billion of direct damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure.

A year into full-scale invasion, West struggles to seize Russian assets for Ukraine

Hundreds of potential international investors met with top Ukrainian and Western officials in London in late June to discuss how to rebuild the country, ravaged by Russia’s war. Those attending the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) were unanimous — Russia should foot the bill. Said bill is devast…

The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Query

Ukraine identifies over 232,000 people helping Russia’s war effort

Ukraine identified over 232,000 people who allegedly took part in Russia’s war, including Moscow’s army personnel, and local collaborators, the Interior Ministry reported on Aug. 3.

The War Criminal database, filled by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and military, includes the names of almost 198,000 Russian troops, 3,500 mercenaries and members of other military formations, 3,200 Ukrainian collaborators, and 401 top Russian officials.

According to the report, those added to the database are monitored by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and Europol, the EU law enforcement agency.

The General Prosecutor’s Office has opened over 100,000 investigations into alleged Russian war crimes since February 2022.

Yurii Bielousov, the head of the War Crimes Department of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, said on Aug. 2 that 386 Russians have been charged with war crimes, including 54 who have been convicted.

However, most have been tried in absentia, and only 15 have been brought to Ukrainian courts, Bielousov said.

He also said that 99% of war crimes are subject to a Ukrainian investigation, and international partners would prosecute the remaining 1%.

Ukraine’s fight to bring Russian leadership to justice puts legal systems to ultimate test

In pursuit of justice for Russia’s many war crimes, Ukraine is actively seeking the establishment of an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already launched investigations into alleged Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Ukraine. However, the…

The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet

Czech components found in Russian kamikaze drones

The Czech company AXI Model Motors said on Aug. 3 that it has “never supplied its products to the military” after a Ukrainian soldier found a component it had manufactured inside a Lancet drone Russian forces have been regularly using against the Ukrainian military on the battlefield.

The soldier published a photo on Aug. 2 of a Russian kamikaze drone downed near Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast. The drone’s electric motor was labeled with the “Made in the Czech Republic” mark and the AXI Model Motors logo.

The Russian military is using the Lancet drones for reconnaissance and strikes.

Model Motors said the component mentioned is no longer manufactured.

There is no information that the company supplied the motors directly to Russia, but rather, “companies from China, Taiwan, and Kyrgyzstan purchased the components before February 2022,” according to Czech newspaper Deník N.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned companies from Kyrgyzstan for helping Russia to bypass Western sanctions on July 20.

The sanctioned companies imported Western-made electronics for Russia’s military, including microchips and telecommunications equipment used in Russian missiles, tanks, helicopters, drones, and radio systems in the war against Ukraine.

According to the U.S. Treasury, Kyrgyzstan-based entities have been frequent exporters of controlled electronics components and other technology to Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Investigative Stories from Ukraine: Massive leak reveals how Putin’s oligarchs evaded Western sanctions imposed due to Ukraine invasion

Welcome to Investigative Stories from Ukraine, the Kyiv Independent’s newsletter that walks you through the most prominent investigations of the past week. If you are fond of in-depth journalism that exposes war crimes, corruption and abuse of power across state organizations in Ukraine and beyond,…

The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet

Russian attacks

Russian forces launched 15 Shahed loitering munitions, conducted 48 airstrikes, and shelled Ukraine 23 over the past day, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported in its evening update on Aug. 3.

Air Force reported the same day downing all Shahed kamikaze drones as well as seven reconnaissance drones.

The Kyiv City Military Administration reported that Ukraine’s capital was targeted by Russian drones overnight. Ukrainian defenses destroyed “almost 15 air targets” approaching Kyiv, according to the administration’s chairman Serhii Popko.

Russian shelling of Kherson on Aug. 3 injured at least eight people, including four emergency workers, the Prosecutor General’s Office reported.

The first responders were injured in a Russian double-tap attack when extinguishing the fire caused by the first Russian shelling against the southern city earlier that day.

Kherson is located on the west bank of the Dnipro River, just across the river from the Russian troops occupying the east bank and deliberately shelling the southern city and other settlements daily.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive lurches forward: Key moment looms as more forces committed

Fresh videos of Western-made armor rolling across open fields, a new settlement liberated, and a lot of noise on Russian military blogger Telegram channels heralded to the world on July 28 that the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive had upped its gear. Almost eight weeks into the long-awaited operat…

The Kyiv IndependentFrancis Farrell

[tech-ahead-corp]

What is Internet of Things (IoT): The Complete A to Z Guide

What is IoT?

IoT stands for the Internet of Things, and it is a network of physical devices that are embedded with software, sensors allowing them to exchange data amongst themselves. With this, it becomes easy for us to integrate physical objects with computing devices. Although IoT is a new technology it is likely to bring considerable changes in our life: whether it is making automobiles smarter with built-in sensors, monitoring heart with implants, managing room temperature with smart thermostats.

Importance of IoT

Considered as one of the most important developments of the 21st century, IoT bringing together an enormous number of objects and people together by making them smarter. It has become an essential part of our day to day lives, and businesses.

It is now easier to add a small chip to most of our inanimate objects such as keys, eyeglasses, wallet, TV etc and track them from our phones. It is also now a breeze to give objects such as your fridge or coffee machine commands via your phone, and it is definitely easier to switch off your electronics with a voice command. All this has been made possible with IoT and is changing lives. The technology also has the ability to store, understand, analyze and action data collection, considering data is the new oil, one cant escape how easier IoT makes the entire data collection process and increasing the impact of Big Data. IoT will integrate into our lives and our devices so well, that it will become hard to imagine our lives without it.

Future of IoT

The investment in IoT in the future will be so intense, that as per a prediction by McKinsey Global Institute, the Total Economic Impact of IoT Could Range Between $4 and $11 Trillion per year by 2025. Interestingly, as per the research giant, Gartner, there will be 20.4 Billion IoT Devices by 2020.

How IoT work?

Internet of Things (IoT) is essentially a network of connecting physical devices to the internet. All IoT devices contain sensors, and processors that function on the data that is collected via these sensors through Machine Learning. Our smartphones play a huge role in IoT since maximum consumer IoT devices can be controlled via smartphone. Secondly, connectivity plays a large role in working on IoT. The sensors/devices are connected to the cloud through a range of methods such as Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular, satellite, etc. The IoT sensors send the data to the cloud for further data processing.

The data is processed in the cloud, and accordingly, the desired action is taken. For instance, checking the weather, etc. Once the data is processed, it is now time for it to reach the user via an alert, this could be an SMS, message, voice response, email, notification, etc. ranging from device to device and depending on the interface. Basis the device and the connection, a user may also be able to control and action a certain desired request.

1) High-Level Architecture

Needless to say, IoT involves a number of complex tools, software, and devices that together form the architecture required for the smooth functioning of any IoT based software or device. It has numerous elements and layers to it to make it into a sophisticated network. There are essentially four stages of this architecture.

2) Sensors/Actuators

One of the major components of the IoT architecture, sensors are responsible for collecting data from the said environment or device and then turn into useful data. Similarly, actuators also occur to change the physical conditions that generate any required data. An actuator can, shut off power, adjust an airflow, etc. This sensing stage conceals everything from enterprise and industrial legacy structures to camera systems, to water detectors, to air quality sensors and even heart rate monitors.

While data processing takes place in almost all stages of the architecture, sensors allow you to do so much better.  Since data is the new oil, a lot of IoT companies require deeper insights, that need widespread processing and hence the data needs to be moved to the cloud. For quicker analytics, once must process the data right at the sensor— at the edge of the edge network.

3) Data Acquisition Systems/Internet Gateway

Sensors collect data in analog form, this data then has to be combined and converted into digital streams for the next stage of processing. Data acquisition systems (DAS) are responsible for performing these data conversion functions. DAS connects with the sensor network, combines the outputs, and then performs the analog-to-digital conversion. The Internet gateway then obtains the digitized data and directs it over Wi-Fi, wired LANs, for further processing. Most stage 2 systems exist close in proximity to the 1st stage’s sensors and actuators.

4) Edge IT

Once the data has been digitized and accumulated, it's ready to move into the realm of IT. However, some of this data may require some more processing before it enters the data center. This is where edge IT systems that perform further analysis, come into play. Edge IT processing systems are mostly situated in remote offices or other locations but generally are in a location that the sensors exist closer to the sensors.

Most IoT data can consume your network bandwidth and flood your data center resources, it is considered best to have systems at the edge proficient in performing analytics to lessen the burden on IT infrastructure. With this staged method, you can pre-process the data and generate meaningful results thereby controlling what is getting passed on.

5) Hardware

IoT hardware includes a variety of devices, that are required for sensors, bridges, etc. These devices are responsible for managing the important functions majorly around activation, security, specific actions, communications, etc. Some of the hardware that comprises of the IoT ecosystem and actually makes it work are-

System on Chip (SOC)

Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)

Remote Terminal Unit (RTU)

Single Board Computer (SBC)

Applications and examples of IoT across industries

The popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and increased usage across the globe has resulted in major industries being transformed due to this technology. IoT has had a drastic positive impact on almost all industries imaginable. The implementation of IoT has improved communication between physical devices and because of this, the connection between the physical devices has enabled automation. Most infrastructure is now wireless and does not require human intervention. Automation of daily mundane tasks has also freed time for other important tasks.

Secondly, IoT has revolutionized the way information is stored and analyzed and in turn actioned. It also monitors the requirements and is able to make changes basis for this monitoring. There are no effective and more efficient processes and asset utilization is more advanced. It also has resulted in increasing productivity and in turn saving large costs. This disruptive technology has found applications across diverse industries, making it more robust and connected.

1) Automotive

Automotive industries are one of those industries that have seen vast disruption across the world, especially with respect to self-driven cars. According to a report by Inc42, the number of vehicles that have IoT devices inside them will grow to 250 Mn by 2020. To simply understand, an IoT device in a car can range from pre-installed Google Maps, entertainment systems, etc. In the future, the number of cars that will have pre-fitted technologies such as stop-and-go autopilot will increase by 2020.

Additionally, there may be a new technology called predictive maintenance that will soon become popular with cars. It essentially handles the overall smooth functioning of the vehicle, reducing and preventing unexpected car breakdowns and crashes. It is also predicted that IoT devices in automobiles will be used to improve safety and security. The automotive industry has already started the revolution and it is bound to grow larger and larger in the coming years.

2) Healthcare

IoT could revolutionize the world of healthcare in the near future and has already started making in-roads. The integration of IoT has opened up a world of possibilities that could completely transform the way diagnosis and treatment take place. It is predicted that by 2024, the Global IoT Healthcare Market is expected to reach a gigantic $14000 million.

IoT Devices, now connected to the internet have the ability to quickly provide a medical history, insight into symptoms and trends, remote healthcare, etc. here has also been a rise in the availability and usage of wearable devices that monitor health hence keeping a constant track of heartbeat, sleep, blood pressure, etc. These IoT devices are also programmed to send alerts in case of an emergency. With the integration of IoT in Healthcare, the way data is collected and monitored has also drastically changed.

3) Manufacturing

Implementation of IoT in manufacturing has been so widespread that it is now called IIoT or Industrial Internet of Things. Morgan Stanley predicts the industrial IoT market size to reach $110 billion by 2020 and according to Accenture, IIoT could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030. This increased growth and momentum can be attributed to multiple factors. However, the top drivers of this growth are better operational efficiency, enhanced productivity, new business developments, and opportunities and a drop in downtime to name a few.

IoT in manufacturing is largely attributed to a network of sensors that are employed to accumulate critical production data, sending it to the cloud and then using cloud software to make sense of this data. This data is interpreted to provide insights, in turn helping organizations change the efficiency of the manufacturing operations.

4) Energy

With increased demand in energy with every passing day, organizations are now increasingly looking at smarter energy solutions. The energy sector has already begun a massive digital transformation and the Internet of Things is a major factor in pushing this transformation. IoT is changing every aspect of the industry and is impacting generation, transmission, distribution, etc.

IoT is enabling remote asset monitoring and management by attaching sensors to equipment at all levels to enable companies to monitor it remotely. By remote monitoring, IoT companies can do timely maintenance, and eventually improve safety. Further, companies are not investing in smart grid technology powered by IoT to help them distribute energy transformation. A smart grid uses IoT to notice changes in electricity supply and demand. It then analysis and reacts to these changes autonomously or provides operators with the information they need to more precisely manage demand. It also improves grid management.

5) Retail

The global IoT retail market size is expected to reach USD 94.44 billion by 2025, as per Grand View Research, Inc., exhibiting a 21.5% CAGR during the forecast period. It is one of those industries wherein the integration of IoT has directly impacted the consumers. Smart devices and IoT technology has enhanced customer experience like never before and are now enabling more conversions because of online penetration. IoT can decrease inventory error and optimize your supply chain management, thereby decreasing labor costs.

IoT can help a retail organization’s traditional physical shop compete with online-first shopping, by exponentially changing the customer experience and decreasing expenses. Within the implementation of the right IoT technology, both consumers and retailers get automated checkout systems, enabling the reduction of lines and a smooth process. Similarly, it can provide better in-store layout optimization along with personalized discounts based on loyalty.

6) Smart Cities

A smart city essentially comprises of a city that has the infrastructure to support wireless technologies and uses information and communication technologies to improve the standard of living, resource utilization, citizen and government welfare, transportation, etc. Citizens function in a smart city ecosystem in a variety of ways by using devices such as smartphones, connected cars, and homes. It also allows communities and government authorities to work on improving air quality by decreasing traffic, streamline trash collection, optimum energy distribution, increased security, etc.

Smart cities also comprise of smart buildings or automated buildings that have the infrastructure and technology that uses automated processes to automatically control and manage that particular building’s operations. These operations vary from heating, air conditioning, lights, security, ventilation, etc. The system or technology runs independently and facilitates better decision making. 

7) Transportation

According to Allied Market Research, the global IoT in the transportation market that was valued at $135.35 billion in 2016, and is now expected to reach $328.76 billion by 2023. The adoption of IoT in the transportation industry has led to better transport management, better traffic control, tolls and ticketing, better security, more safety, etc. IoT technology has enabled complete control and monitoring of railways and trains also. This has resulted in better performance, fewer maintenance issues, and better services. Implementation of IoT in railways and other public transport systems has also enabled scheduling, reliability, customer feedback, etc. Similarly, IoT systems on the road can help analyze the flow of traffic better and eventually provide helpful data to enable smooth traffic.

8) Education

Emerging technology has resulted in a radical change in the education sector. According to a research study, “IoT in Education Market” by MarketsandMarkets, the global market size is expected to “grow from $4.8 billion in 2018 to $11.3 billion by 2023.”

The increased usage of smartphones and laptops has urged the students to use these for note-making, schedule making, research, etc. The school has also switched to a smart system that automates some work of teachers, such as sending our circulars, updating parents on a daily basis about the child’s performance, attendance, etc. Connected technology also helps the teachers in grading faster and keeps them updated on the new and relevant news, unlike books. Smart tech is also enabling teachers and schools to study the data of students and in turn offer individual advice, basic data analysis that will help the students.

Another major breakthrough in the field of education, due to IoT has been safety. Today, parents can get a notification every time their child leaves the school grounds along with details because of a small chip on ID Cards. This enables the school and parents to keep a close eye on their children and ensure safety.

9) Agriculture

Also known as smart farming, it comprises of a hi-tech system of growing food sustainably. Smart farming will allow farmers to reduce wastage and increase productivity ranging from the quality of fertilizer used to the number of journeys of a farm vehicle. IoT based systems can monitor the crop field, with the help of sensors that keep track of humidity, temperature, rain, etc. IoT devices are expected to collect humongous amounts of data and analyze it to be able to foresee cattle’s health, weather, soil quality, etc. Since it will be able to predict these things, it will end up reducing the overall risk factor related to agriculture that also ends up losing.

IoT systems can also automate the irrigation process, in turn, saving water. The agriculture industry is also using IoT enabled drones that are helping with health assessment of crops, crop monitoring, crop spraying, planting, and soil and field analysis. As per BI Intelligence, the number of agriculture IoT device installations will hit 75 million by 2020, growing 20% annually.

10) Supply Chain

IoT based technology and systems, in the Supply Chain, are being implemented to measure and keep a better track of location, movement, handling, etc. Most supply chains have already installed RFID chips for the same. IoT technology is a brilliant way to keep track of products and authenticate shipments using GPS and monitor storage conditions that in turn enhance quality management. It also helps in keeping a better and more updated track of inventory and due to data collection; it can forecast your stock requirements for the future. Additionally, these technologies keep track of maintenance and prevent downtime that can result in losses and spoiled vendor relations.

Data Processing

1)  Cloud

With there being a different kind of data available, there is some data that requires more in-depth processing, and in turn, gives time for feedback since it doesn't have to be immediate. This data is forwarded to physical data centers or different cloud-based systems that have much more powerful IT systems that have the ability to analyze, manage, and securely store this data. This is definitely a long process wherein results take a while till they reach Stage 4, but this enables businesses to execute a more in-depth analysis, along with combining your data from sensors, devices, and other resources to understand it better. Stage 4 processing may take place on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid cloud system, but the type of processing executed in this stage remains the same, regardless of the platform.

2) IoT Platforms

IoT platforms are essentially supported software that ideally connects everything in an IoT ecosystem. They act as the bridge between sensors and networks. It eases communication, device management, data flow, and overall functionality. IoT platforms bring together all the different kinds of hardware, different connectivity options, software, etc together. They handle all related communications, provide security for the device and its users, and integrate with most web services. Most importantly, they also collect and analyze data. These platforms may help you save time and cost in the long run since they will help you overcome technical challenges that you may not be an expert in.

3) APIs

Once cloud and IoT platforms are established, systems still need to communicate and work together and here is when an Application Program Interfaces(APIs) comes to light. Since programs are usually written in different languages, APIs provide the platform for these languages to break away from the language barrier. Or to understand it better, it allows two applications to talk to each other.  APIs give companies the independence to work on their own expertise by plugging in software and tools of other companies whenever required to create the complete IoT product.

4) ML + AI

These cognitive technologies have become an important part of the Internet of Things because they make products smarter, and that is the very core of IoT. The predictive abilities in machine learning software, prove to be very useful for IoT devices. Similarly, as mentioned earlier, it can predict when maintenance is required, henceforth saving businesses from the cost of downtime. ML and AI, due to data analysis also provide personalized experiences to its users, something that is of great use in an IoT device as well.

Impact of the Internet of Things

The integration of IoT in almost every industry has impacted the world greatly. From consumers to organizations, to businesses, to governments, this particular technology has seen a great amount of investment and popularity in the last decade that will increase exponentially in the coming years. The world is moving towards creating an entire ecosystem for the Internet of Things and it is bound to hugely impact our personal lives and our work lives.

1) Lives

One of the biggest ways in which human lives will be impacted will be due to Smart Cities. Smart cities are already functioning in various parts of the world and are responsible for making urban life faster with more convenient transportation systems, better and safe street lighting and energy-efficient buildings to name a few. For instance, the city of Barcelona has a citywide Wi-Fi presence, and networks that collect information that are further linked to sensors and IoT software which analysis the collected data hence enabling the entire city to provide better water technology, automatic street lights, automated irrigation for parks, etc, waste pickups, efficient public transport system, etc.

In a smart city, early warning systems can also be installed so as to give out prompt warnings in case of any major accidents, earthquakes, or storms occur, or other natural disasters and inform the nearby first responders, police, and hospitals at the same time. Another aspect that will be impacted due to IoT, in our daily lives are the increased usage of smart speakers like Amazon's Echo and Google Home that makes it easier to play music, set timers, or get general information. Similarly, home security systems make it easier to monitor and keep track of indoors and outdoors and enable you to talk to or see visitors.

Likewise, smart thermostats can be controlled from applications on our smartphones and can be enabled to heat our houses before we arrive, similarly, smart light bulbs can make appear as if someone is at home, when in fact nobody is home. Moving on, IoT will have a wonderful effect on waste management. There will also be a seamless integration of light, heat and air conditioning in a smart city, in turn, saving on a lot of money. For food, your fridge will record anything you don’t eat or waste and will provide to be data for future analytics, helping you examine trends and patterns. Next, our personal health and wellbeing will be impacted hugely.

With wearable technology, we will be able to track our vital signs, sleep patterns, daily nutrition, check-up schedules, exercises, etc. In the future, these wearables will also be able to notify you in case of any potential dangers, etc. With even more possibilities, we know the best is yet to come and our lives are about to be altered completely. IoT technologies will become a part of our lives with such intensity that it will be hard to imagine our lives without it, much like the internet right now.

2) Business

Businesses are already seeing the massive returns on IoT investments. However, it is essential for businesses to develop and/or implement the right technology.

IoT and its technologies will drastically alter the way in which businesses track and manage their inventory. Installing IoT devices in storage units and warehouses will automatically enable them to manage inventory changes hence leaving time for personnel to invest in other tasks.

Next, IoT will completely transform the entire data collection and analytics process. Most businesses thrive on data and now with IoT, businesses will have direct access to consumer data like never before. IoT devices also track and record trends in which a consumer interacts with any device. Hence, making the device smarter by allowing them to function according to the needs of the consumer thereby enhancing the consumer experience. This simultaneously helps businesses to interpret this data for improvement and to cater to consumers better. Businesses use this data to study consumer requirements, buyer cycles, and scope for improvement, right platforms, and methods for marketing and communications, and inventions.

IoT devices allow you to connect and control them to improve efficiency, which directly affects the productivity and efficiency of the business. IoT software and appliances allow workers and staff to accomplish large-scale tasks and projects faster and without errors; in turn, having a positive effect on their motivation.

IoT Technologies

Businesses need to make significant investments in training and hiring IoT developers, especially in India. Listed below are some of the top IoT technologies that can be utilized for application development:

1) IoT Security

With large data, comes more responsibility. More and more security technologies will be needed to protect IoT devices and software from hacks, physical tampering, and damage, malpractices, etc. The challenge that arises in IoT security is the fact that many things or devices that enable IoT have simple OS and processors and may not necessarily support more advanced security software.

2) IoT Analytics

Most business models require newer analytics tools and algorithms because data will increase substantially in the coming years and hence the requirements of IoT will change. It will require advanced structures of analytics, architectures, ML, etc. A distributed analytics technology will let IoT businesses to secure their networks. 

3) Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks

Low-power, short-range networks are the future of wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering connections that use wide-area IoT networks. Commercial and technical trade-offs will mean that many results will coexist, with no single winner.

4) Low-Power Wide-Area Networks

Modern cellular networks are failing to provide the required and correct combination of operational costs and technical features that are required for IoT applications. The applications mostly need wide-area coverage along with good battery life, a low bandwidth, a high connection density and overall low hardware and operating costs. Emerging solutions such as narrowband IoT will likely dominate this space.

5) IoT Operating Systems

Smaller operations systems will become popular in the immediate future due to the complexity of large-scale operating systems such as Mac and Windows. They also require additional resources for all major IoT applications. The smaller IoT operating systems are said to have excellent event-driven tasks and hence businesses can benefit without spending extra resources or money on developing IoT applications on the complex traditional OS.

6) Event Stream Processing

IoT development applications, in the near future, will generate elevated data rates that ideally should be analyzed in real-time. Some IoT development systems have the ability to create ten thousand events per second but the problem arises because they are mostly restricted to telecom industries. For addressing such requirements DSCPs (Distributed Stream Computing Platforms) are the solution. These can process very high-rate data streams and perform real-time analytics thereby making It paramount.

Also read: Top 10 Internet of Things (IoT) trends that will rule in 2020 Microsoft Azure IoT Helping Business to Transform Digitally

Conclusion

Needless to say, IoT is here to stay and grow exponentially. The rate of growth in the coming future will be much higher than what has been in the last decade. With the Internet of Things finding direct pathways to consumer and impacting both human lives and businesses exponentially, the development of IoT based applications and devices will increase. IoT platforms and IoT devices will change our lives for good.

TechAhead, a leading IoT app development company is known to deliver high quality mobile apps for all platforms and frameworks. Contact our experts now to take your business to the next level.

[technicaldr]

How AI and digital health are shaping global healthcare

An AI-enabled healthcare future

Health-focused technologies have the vast growth potential to bring about positive change, including new treatments, improved patient outcomes, better and earlier diagnostics and prevention, earlier treatment and improvements in quality and efficiency of healthcare provision, the report says.

Innovation can also help bridge the healthcare funding gap by reducing overall healthcare spending and boosting efficiency, it notes. National Health Service (NHS) England says telemedicine – remote diagnosis and treatment of patients using telecommunications solutions – could reduce the burden of patient care by 25%, for example.

In the US, half of the population is affected by chronic diseases, which contribute to more than 85% of overall healthcare costs. This problem is global, however, with the World Health Organization estimating that non-communicable diseases take 41 million lives annually – 77% of which occur in low- and middle-income countries at a cost of more than $2-trillion per year.

To address these challenges, improvements in prevention, monitoring and consultation through digital and AI-enabled healthcare approaches could significantly increase healthcare access and reduce costs, the report states.

And the field is evolving rapidly with the recent arrival of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Med-PaLM. While the potential impacts of such tech on medicine are still being determined, digital innovation is ensuring an ever-growing toolbox of new solutions and opportunities.

Lack of internet access a barrier

But technological innovation on its own cannot fully drive the change – underlying infrastructure and policies must also be addressed.

In 2020, a survey found the share of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (30%) who had used the internet in the previous three months was less than a third of the figure for North America (91.5%), according to Our World in Data.

Currently, almost three billion people – more than a third of the planet’s population – have no connection to the internet. Together with the need for strong data sharing, security and confidentiality, greater internet access is a major enabler required to ensure equitable access to new digital healthcare innovations.

Deploying digital health solutions at scale

Multi-sectoral partnerships, such as between digital solutions providers, policymakers and stakeholders such as the civil sector and philanthropy, can help rapidly deploy digital solutions at scale.

To provide just one example of the power of such partnerships, when the pandemic struck, both the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and the Ghana Health Service turned to the Sormas Foundation’s open-source, mobile e-health platform to manage the disease. Sormas was already being deployed throughout the two countries, but more than 400 districts activated a new module for the platform, which was rapidly developed to detect and control the virus, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

Looking forward, big data models, telemedicine, predictive medication, wearable sensors and a wealth of new platforms and apps could help us rethink how the world provides, accesses and manages health and healthcare.

But a perfect storm of investments, innovation and policy is needed to increase global access to quality healthcare provision for people both with and without an internet connection.

  Technical Doctor's insight:

Contact Details : inquiry@technicaldr.com or 877-910-0004 www.technicaldr.com

[olko71]

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2023/01/debt-costs-help-push-government-borrowing-to-30-year-high

Debt costs help push government borrowing to 30-year high

Getty Images

Government borrowing hit a new high in December, driven by the cost of supporting households with their energy bills and rising debt interest costs.

Borrowing, the difference between spending and tax income, was £27.4bn, the most for any December since records began in 1993.

Interest on government debt hit £17.3bn, more than doubling in a year.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said inflation was the main factor behind the rise in borrowing.

While gas prices have begun to come down, the typical UK energy bill is still almost twice what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine.

To help ease the burden, the government cut energy bills in England, Scotland and Wales by £400 this winter.

It also launched the Energy Price Guarantee scheme, which limits average household bills to £2,500 per year.

What is the energy price cap and what will happen to bills?

From where does the government borrow billions?

It comes as inflation, the rate at which prices rise, is at its highest level for 40 years, putting millions of households under pressure.

Grant Fitzner, chief economist at the ONS, told the BBC that the cost of energy bill support had added around £7bn to the December borrowing figures.

Meanwhile interest payable on UK gilts, or bonds, which the government sells to international investors to raise the money it needs, has risen sharply, he said. This is because many gilts are “index linked”, meaning the government’s repayments rise in line with the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation which is currently at double-digit levels.

Getty Images

“If you stripped those two factors out, then underlying public sector borrowing would have been lower than a year ago,” Mr Fitzner told the Today programme:

He said government borrowing was likely to fall once the energy support schemes were no longer needed and inflation – which is thought to have peaked – finally comes down.

‘Deteriorating fast’

But Ruth Gregory, senior UK economist at Capital Economics, said the borrowing figures “provided more evidence that the government’s fiscal position is deteriorating fast”.

She said borrowing was well above what economists had expected, debt interest payments were at an “eye-watering” level, government spending was high, and there were “pressures from the weakening economy”.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said he will have to make “eye watering” public spending cuts to get the public finances back on track.

He has also had to reverse swathes of unfunded tax cuts promised by his predecessor, Liz Truss, after her plans sparked panic on financial markets.

Commenting on the latest borrowing figures, Mr Hunt said the government was “helping millions of families with the cost of living, but we must also ensure that our level of debt is fair for future generations”.

He added that the government has “already taken some tough decisions to get debt falling” as it tries to halve inflation and boost economic growth.

‘Turned a corner’

The ONS said total public sector debt reached £2.5 trillion at the end of December, or around 99.5% of UK economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP) – a level last seen in the early 1960s.

December’s figure took borrowing to £128.1bn so far in the financial year to the end of March, £5.1bn more year-on-year.

Bank Governor Andrew Bailey said last week that inflation might have turned a corner after it fell in November and December, adding that it is “likely to fall rapidly” this year as energy prices fall.

However, Mr Bailey also warned that high rates of job vacancies meant employees were in a strong bargaining position for wage rises which could stop inflation falling as quickly.

At 10.5%, the annual pace of price rises is more than five times higher than the Bank’s 2% target at the moment.

Without two factors – the energy support schemes and higher debt interest – borrowing would have been lower, the ONS says.

That raises an interesting question: why, given that Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation is a discredited statistic, does the government pay higher debt interest at RPI?

It’s consistently higher than the official measure targeted by the Bank of England – the Consumer Prices Index.

The surprising answer is that the government doesn’t, as you or I would, seek to find the cheapest interest rate it can.

Instead it’s issuing “gilts”, also known as bonds, to suit big investors such as private pension funds, whose payouts to customers are linked to RPI and therefore need an asset linked to it.

This is one of many reasons why when the government borrows, it’s very unlike the borrowing a household or business does.

More on this story

Who will get £900 to help with energy bills?

9 January

How does government borrowing work?

2 hours ago

[world-store]

Public-Serving Colleges Should Get More Federal Money

Tyler Cowen drove a lot of traffic to my piece critiquing his thinking on higher education. All it took was Cowen posting a two-sentence comment on Marginal Revolution: Joshua Kim comment on my higher education worries. I think he is saying they don’t get enough money!? Good. Let’s get to the heart of the disagreement about the place that higher education should play in our country. I’m arguing—and would learn from hearing the counterargument—that public-serving higher education should be treated as a public good. Postsecondary institutions whose mission and operations are optimized to educate, train and credential learners—community colleges, land-grant institutions, comprehensive regional public universities, HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions come to mind—should get more public money. Where should that public money come from? Three words: tax the rich. The marginal tax rate on high-income earners should go up, and some of that money should go to public-serving colleges and universities. Today, the marginal tax rate for single filers in the highest taxable income bracket ($578,126 or more) is 37 percent. That is down from 92 percent in 1952. There is plenty of room to raise taxes on the highest-income earners to free up some money to invest in public-serving higher education. Even better, let’s adopt Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan Ultra-Millionaire tax plan. That proposal would introduce a 2 percent tax on households on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6 percent tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. Wealth is so highly concentrated in the U.S. that this tax would only impact 75,000 households but produce $3.75 trillion in new revenue over a 10-year period. A 2020 Center for American Progress report estimated that community colleges face an annual funding shortfall of $78 billion. On average, community colleges receive $8,800 less in education revenue per student than four-year institutions. The reason for this funding gap is that states provide much less money to community colleges than four-year schools and that students pay much less to attend. As states will not or cannot raise taxes to adequately fund community colleges, the federal government could step in to make up the shortfall. These dollars could be easily generated by instituting a wealth tax on the wealthiest 0.1 percent of households. How much good could community colleges do with an extra $78 billion each year? The trend of state-level disinvestment from higher education is well-known. A recent NEA study found that 32 states spent less on public colleges and universities in 2020 than in 2008. That public funding shortfall has primarily been made up by an increase in the amount of money that students and their families spend to pay for tuition, with the predictable result being a student debt crisis. Let’s stop waiting for the states to restore funding for public-serving colleges and universities and instead focus on new federal dollars made available through taxes on the wealthy. Two counterarguments (there are many more) to raising taxes on the wealthy and allocating those funds to public-serving institutions are a: higher education should be considered a private good, or b: higher taxes on the rich are always and everywhere a bad idea. Suppose we could set aside all the arguments about the wisdom of taxing the rich. Can we at least agree that community colleges and other public-serving colleges and universities should get more money? Can anyone make an argument as to why the top 0.1 percent of households should control almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent? While, at the same time, public-serving institutions like community colleges should lack the funds to provide a quality postsecondary education to anyone seeking that opportunity? Tell me why it is a bad idea to raise taxes on rich people and send that money to our most cash-strapped but most impactful public-serving colleges and universities. This is a straightforward argument designed to get a conversation going. Taxing the wealthy equals more money for public-serving colleges and universities. What I want to see happen is less money for rich people and more money for community colleges, comprehensive regional publics and other schools that offer degrees for a reasonable cost to lower- and middle-income students. How is that not a good idea? I’d like to understand. Read the full article

[prasanththampi]

ISBM EXAM ANSWER SHEETS PROVIDED | ISBM DMS EXAM ANSWER SHEET | ISBM MBA...

: Quantitative Techniques Case Studies Case (20 Marks) Since 9/11•terrorism has cased threat attacks which have drawn the attention of political and media world. The US h to launch. a 'war on terror' and applied a range of counteract terrorism safety measures towards aviation, pub transportation, ports, borders, public Hermie places, etc. While these steps may show cheap course of act!on government and security services, it is quite expensive. According to the calculations done by Mueller and Stewa (2011), the expenditure of US homeland and security has gone over 1.1 trillion dollars, which includes federal, state a domestic government, and private sector, and also the cost of opportunity. The Iraq an Afghanistan wars have added 1 trillion dollars to this expenditure. The expenditure of federal, state and local US government on home ground secur has been estimated to 75 billion dollars more than the last levels of 2001. It is seen that US is not the only country to in these high level of expenses, even though no other country can match its per capita or GDP expenditure. F example, increased expenditure• on homeland security in UK, Canada and Australia is nearly one half to one quarter US expenditure per capita or GDP. Nevertheless, in 2009, the government spent nearly 141.6 billion dollars each ye on homeland security. This figure is expected to reach about 300 billion dollars by 2016. After 9/11, the main objecti has been to prevent or alleviate any harm or casualty as a result of terrorism. The main issue is, if this expenditure counteracting terrorism been invest.ed in a way that has increased the cost of security of the public efficiently or no Hence, the commission report of 9/11, among other issues, was called upon • the US government to execute safe measures which show evaluation of risks and effectiveness of expenditure. Nevertheless, while the US needs t evaluate expenditure benefits for government regulations, such evaluation seems co have not been done for homela security in general, or for the DHS (department of homeland security). One of the causes could be that DHS is not ab to take up such evaluation. The NRC (national research council) committee of the National Academics of Science Engineering and Medicine, made a request through S Congress to evaluate the functions of DHS, which was working the project for almost 2 years, came up with some surprising result-. Besides e'•aluation of natural disasters, t committee 'did not find any DHS risk analysis capabilities and methods that are yet adequate for supporting DH decision making.' Due to which, very less confidence could be had in most of the risk evaluation done by DHS. T committee said that "it is not yet clear that DHS is on a I ! trajectory for development of methods and capability that sufficient to ensure reliable risk analyses". usually the government and their rigid agencies shoo a neutral behav towards their decision making. Stewart says that "the standard criterion for deciding whether a government; programm can be justified on economic principles is net present value - the discounted monetized value of expected net benef (i.e., benefits minus costs)" and that "expected values (an unbiased estimate) is the appropriate estimate for use" (UM 1992). Answer the following question. Q1. What are the reasons that show that DHS is incapable in evaluating the risks of national security? (Hint: while the US needs to evaluate expenditure benefits for government regulations, such evaluation 7/23/22, 4:06 PM Exam Paper https://www.isbm.org.in/examsoft/exampaper_final.php?id=71253 2/3 seem to have not been done for homeland security in general, DHS is not able to take up such evaluation.) Q2. The government spent nearly 141.6 billion dollars each year on (Hint: homeland security) CASE STUDY (20 Marks) The price P per unit at which a company can sell all that it produces is given by the function P(x) = 300 — 4x. The co function is c(x) = 500 + 28x where x is the number of units produced. Find x so that the profit is maximum. Answer the following question. Q1. Find the value of x. Q2. In using regression analysis for making predictions what are the assumptions involved. Q3. What is a simple linear regression model? Q4. What is a scatter diagram method? CASE STUDY (20 Marks) Mr Sehwag invests Rs 2000 every year with a company, which pays interest at 10% p.a. He allows his deposit accumulate at C.I. Find the amount to the credit of the person at the end of 5th year. Answer the following question. Q1. What is the Time Value of Money concept. Q2. What do you mean by present value of money? Q3. What is the Future Value of money. Q4. What the amount to be credited at the end of 5th year. case study (20 Marks) Time series analysis has two important aims: 1) recognizing the quality of the phenomenon shown by the series studies, and 2) Both the aims need the plan of the viewed time series data is recognized and somewhat officia explained: A time series is said to be a 'collection of observations made in sequence with time'. For example: recordi level of daily rainfall, periodical total domestic product of US, and monthly strength of the. workers in Marine Corps for specific rank and MOS. The evaluation of time series gives instruments for picking a symbolic model and deliveri forecasts. There are two sorts of times series data: • Continuous: in this the data consists of study at every moment, f example, seismic movement recorded on a seismogram. • Discrete: the data contains recordings taken at differe periods ,like, statistics of each month crime. Until the data is absolutely haphazard, studies in time series are usua related to each and the following studies could be partly ascertain by the last values. For instance, the reaso pertaining to the meteorology which have an effect on the temperature for any given day tend to have some affect on t next day's climate. Hence, the observations of the past temperature are helpful for predicting temperatures for t following days. • A time series can be deterministic if there are no haphazard or feasible features but goes in a set a foreseeable manner. The data gathered during the classical physics experiment like showing Newton's Law of Motion, one example of a deterministic time series. The stochastic type of series is more appropriate to the economet function. Stochastic variables contain undefined or arbitrary viewpoint. Though the worth of each study cannot precisely foreseen, calculating the various observations could follow the expected method. These methods can explained through the statistical models. According to these models, studies differ erratically on the underlying mea value whtch is the role of time. Time series data can be put in the following categories: one or more performance facto trend, seasonality, cyclical function and random sound. Various kinds of time series predicting models give forecas through extrapolating the previous performance of the values of a specified \'l!riable of interest. Consecutive study econometric times series are generally not free and forecast can be made on the basis of last observations. Althou precise predictions can be made with deterministic time series, predictions of stochastic time series are restricted 'conditional statements regarding the future on the basis of particular hypothesis.' Armstrong (2001) says, "The bas Assumption is that the variable ui!! continue in the future as it has behaved in the past. " Particularly, the time seri predictions are suitable for stochastic type of data in which the fundamental root cause of variation like, trend, cyclic performance, seasonality, and uneven variations, do not change radically m time. Therefore, modeling is considered be more suitable temporarily instead of permanent predictions. Answer the following question. 7/23/22, 4:06 PM Exam Paper https://www.isbm.org.in/examsoft/exampaper_final.php?id=71253 3/3 Q1. Write briefly on time-series analysis. (Hint: recognizing the quality of the phenomenon shown by the series of studies, and, both the aims need the plan of the viewed time series data is recognized and somewhat officially explained)

[indodatacenter]

Singapore's Data Center Costs Are Heading Up Since 2022

This article can be the answer for those who wonder why Singapore’s Data Center Costs keep rising until 2022, as I always follow data center news. 

Why does Data Center Cost in Singapore More Expensive? 

The high cost is because Singapore uses cooling systems that require electricity and water. This is because it doesn't have enough natural sources of energy to produce enough warm air during wintertime to keep things cool without electricity.

In addition, Singapore has exceptionally high humidity levels year round — which means it needs a lot of air conditioning in its data centers to keep it cool.

Data center construction costs in Singapore have increased by about 30 percent over the past seven years, and demand for data center space has increased by almost ten times, according to a report from real estate research firm CBRE.

"We anticipate that the demand for data center space will continue to grow rapidly," said Steven Lim, CBRE's head of research and advisory in Singapore. "However, new data center development is currently prohibited under Singapore's land use policy at the end of 2021."

Read more about: data center optimization

Digital Transformation Increasing Demand for Data Center

Singapore data center demand is growing at a rapid pace. The country's economy has been growing steadily for the past few years, and experts expect it to continue in the coming years.

Some expect the current growth rate of 4% to reach 6% by 2022. In addition, Singapore's GDP will rise from S$2 trillion to S$3 trillion by 2022, and its population will grow from 5 million to 7 million by 2022.

Singapore also serves most of the digital transformation needs in Indonesia, which has 180 million active internet users. Because before 2021, the leading players in the cloud and data center are not yet fully available in Indonesia.

Energy Supply Problem

Natural gas is one of Singapore's primary fuel sources for power plants. In addition to being used for generating electricity, especially in the data center industry.

A gas shortage hit Singapore in 2019. In 2023, the primary gas source, Indonesia, will stop supplying. The Indonesian government reasoned that it was prioritizing domestic needs. 

The city-state's already using hydroelectricity, but this source is not always available because there are only two dams in Singapore. The government has plans to build more dams to meet its growing electricity needs, but this will take years to complete.

Indonesia supplies 90% of Singapore's gas needs.

The majority (about 90%) of Singapore's natural gas supply comes from Indonesia through a pipeline across the Straits of Malacca. In December 2018, Indonesia announced plans to stop supplying gas to Singapore after 2023 due to a dispute over pricing and other issues.[1] The lack of an alternative source has led some experts to predict that Singapore will face power shortages when this occurs.[2]

The government has been trying to solve these issues since March 2019 and has made some progress. However, it remains uncertain whether they could solve this problem in time for 2022 when Singtel's new data center is to open at Changi Business Park South zone and become operational.

The cost of electricity isn't likely to change anytime soon because Singapore plans to continue using nuclear energy for its electricity production rather than switch over to renewable sources like solar or wind power to meet its carbon dioxide reduction targets under the Paris climate agreement. 

This means they will need more nuclear reactors to meet their future energy needs, which will mean higher electricity costs.

Conclusion:

Singapore's data centers are expensive, costing between $20 million and $30 million per megawatt, according to a report from CBRE. That's the most expensive in the world, with only China and India coming close.

Building a data center near Singapore and its energy requirements and infrastructure are becoming increasingly expensive. These factors drive data center operators to consider other locations such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

Singapore is one of the most expensive countries in the world to build and operate data centers. They can now optimize the data center to increase its efficiency.

[connorland]

Orases, a Maryland custom software development company, has been selected by Inc. Magazine to their list of the 5,000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America in 2021.

[robertreich]

What if We Actually Taxed the Rich?

Income and wealth are now more concentrated at the top than at any time over the last 80 years, and our unjust tax system is a big reason why. The tax code is rigged for the rich, enabling a handful of wealthy individuals to exert undue influence over our economy and democracy. 

Conservatives fret about budget deficits. Well, then, to pay for what the nation needs -- ending poverty, universal health care, infrastructure, reversing climate change, investing in communities, and so much more -- the super-wealthy have to pay their fair share. 

Here are seven necessary ways to tax the rich.

First: Repeal the Trump tax cuts.

It’s no secret Trump’s giant tax cut was a giant giveaway to the rich. 65 percent of its benefits go to the richest fifth, 83 percent to the richest 1 percent over a decade. In 2018, for the first time on record, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half. Repealing the Trump tax cut’s benefits to the wealthy and big corporations, as Joe Biden has proposed, will raise an estimated $500 billion over a decade.

Second: Raise the tax rate on those at the top. 

In the 1950s, the highest tax rate on the richest Americans was over 90 percent. Even after tax deductions and credits, they still paid over 40 percent. But since then, tax rates have dropped dramatically. Today, after Trump’s tax cut, the richest Americans pay less than 26 percent, including deductions and credits. And this rate applies only to dollars earned in excess of $523,601. Raising the marginal tax rate by just one percent on the richest Americans would bring in an estimated $123 billion over 10 years. 

Third: A wealth tax on the super-wealthy.

Wealth is even more unequal than income. The richest 0.1% of Americans have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Just during the pandemic, America’s billionaires added $1.3 trillion to their collective wealth. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would charge 2 percent on wealth over $50 million and 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion. It would only apply to about 75,000 U.S. households, fewer than 0.1% of taxpayers. Under it, Jeff Bezos would owe $5.7 billion out of his $185 billion fortune -- less than half what he made in one day last year. The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a decade, enough to pay for universal childcare and free public college with plenty left over.

Fourth: A transactions tax on trades of stock.

The richest 1 percent owns 50 percent of the stock market. A tiny 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions -- just $1 per $1,000 traded -- would raise $777 billion over a decade.That’s enough to provide housing vouchers to all homeless people in America more than 12 times over.

Fifth: End the "stepped-up cost basis" loophole.

The heirs of the super-rich pay zero capital gains taxes on huge increases in the value of what they inherit because of a loophole called the stepped-up basis. At the time of death, the value of assets is “stepped up” to their current market value -- so a stock that was originally valued at, say, one dollar when purchased but that’s worth $1,000 when heirs receive it, escapes $999 of capital gains taxes. This loophole enables huge and growing concentrations of wealth to be passed from generation to generation without ever being taxed. Eliminating this loophole would raise $105 billion over a decade.

Six: Close other loopholes for the super-rich.

For example, one way the managers of real estate, venture capital, private equity and hedge funds reduce their taxes is the carried interest loophole, which allows them to treat their income as capital gains rather than ordinary wage income. That means they get taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher tax rate on incomes. Closing this loophole is estimated to raise $14 billion over a decade.

Seven: Increase the IRS’s funding so it can audit rich taxpayers.

Because the IRS has been so underfunded, millionaires are far less likely to be audited than they used to be. As a result, the IRS fails to collect a huge amount of taxes from wealthy taxpayers. Collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the richest 1 percent would generate at least $1.75 trillion over the decade. So fully fund the IRS.

Together, these 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years -- enough to tackle the great needs of the nation. As inequality has exploded, our unjust tax system has allowed the richest Americans to cheat their way out of paying their fair share. 

It’s not radical to rein in this irresponsibility. It’s radical to let it continue.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

HOW YOU FEEL about the idea of the government giving people free money depends a lot on where you sit on the political spectrum. For some, a universal basic income (UBI) is a sensible way to fight poverty and share prosperity while, for others, it’s an invitation to sloth and moral decay. But, until this year, it was mostly an idea that lived on the margins of the political mainstream, debated and discussed in academic circles and overlooked by almost everyone else. Then, as with so many other things, COVID-19 changed everything.

Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the idea of a UBI has moved to the front lines in the increasingly urgent effort to support economies that have been waylaid by the measures being taken to fight COVID-19. And, while it has traditionally been the exclusive territory of wonkish economists and progressive politicians, it is now supported—and in some cases championed—by high-profile conservatives who would have shunned it just a few months ago. In mid-March, Utah senator Mitt Romney publicly endorsed the concept, and a few days later, a version of it found its way into Donald Trump’s $2 trillion (US) economic stimulus package, which will provide each American adult with a $1,200 “recovery rebate.” In the United Kingdom, prime minister Boris Johnson indicated that he was willing to consider the idea, and on April 3, the editorial board of the Financial Times, one of the most unabashedly procapitalist publications in the world, wrote that “policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.”

Here in Canada, it’s a former adviser to Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper who has most vocally (and effectively) made the case for a $2,000-per-month cash payment to all Canadians. “While it pains me as a conservative to suggest this,” Ken Boessenkool wrote in a Globe and Mail op-ed, “the government should consider adding another $27-billion dollar expenditure for a Crisis Basic Income as a supplement to what has been announced.” He’s not alone. On April 2, the Business Council of Alberta, an organization that was founded last year by heavyweights like former pipeline executive Hal Kvisle and TransAlta CEO Dawn Farrell, endorsed an even more generous temporary payment of $2,500 a month.

Conservatives aren’t suddenly flocking to the idea of a UBI because of a newfound concern with structural poverty or income inequality. They’re doing it because it’s the most efficient way to get money into the hands of individuals and prevent the economy from seizing up completely—and because it largely cuts government bureaucracy out of the equation. But they may soon find that their preferred economic cure to the coronavirus will long outlive the enemy it was intended to fight. After all, income taxes were first introduced as temporary measures intended to address a short-term crisis and are still with us today. The Spanish government has already announced its intention to not only implement a basic income but also, according to economy minister Nadia Calviño, to make sure it’s something that “becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument.” Will Canada be next?

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[antoine-roquentin]

It is​ a measure of Krugman’s increasing despair that by 2013 his jaundiced view of American class society converged with his worries about the intellectual framing of economics. As Republican and Democratic centrists struggled to fashion a bipartisan majority around a programme to slash the deficit, it dawned on Krugman that the entirety of what he had once confidently described as ‘responsible’ economic policy was shot through with class interest. Talk of fiscal sustainability wasn’t just bad economics; it was, Krugman now believed, class war by stealth. In End This Depression Now (2012), Krugman broke one of the taboos that separate mainstream New Keynesians from their left-wing heterodox counterparts. He invoked the Polish economist Michał Kalecki, whose work is commonly cited as having bridged Keynesianism and Marxism. In 1943, in wartime exile in Oxford, Kalecki had explained why delivering stabilisation policy in a sustained way, as Keynes envisioned, might not be possible in a class-divided society. At the depths of the crisis, Keynesians would be summoned by the powers that be to do the minimum that was necessary, but as soon as the worst had passed, well before the economy reached full employment, the same policies would be anathematised as undermining ‘confidence’. The balance of what was ‘sensible’ would be set by the interests of the wealthiest and most secure. Their principal concern wasn’t full employment, but profit, which dictated stimulus in a slump and restraint whenever profits were squeezed by increased wages in a tightening labour market. Five years before Samuelson, in his classic textbook of 1948, laid out his vision of the complementarity of macroeconomic management and market-based microeconomics, Kalecki had already shown why it would end in failure.

As Krugman remarked, when he first read Kalecki’s essay he ‘thought it was over the top. Kalecki was, after all, a declared Marxist ... But, if you haven’t been radicalised by recent events, you haven’t been paying attention; and policy discourse since 2008 has run exactly along the lines Kalecki predicted.’ After a short burst of emergency Keynesianism, by 2010 deficits not unemployment were the problem. And any effort to push for better conditions was immediately countered with the insistence that it would induce ‘economic policy uncertainty’ and hold the economy back. It wasn’t unemployed Americans, Krugman raged, but imaginary ‘confidence fairies’ that were dictating policy.

Krugman reassured himself by adding that Kalecki was far more of a Keynesian than he was a Marxist, but quibbles aside, Krugman’s own transformation could hardly be denied. The members of the American left he had savaged in the 1990s were now his friends. He was talking about power in the starkest terms. But the question was unavoidable: once you lost your faith in the state as a tool of reformist intervention, once you truly reckoned with the omnipresence of class power, what choices remained but fatalism or a demand for a revolutionary politics? Between those alternatives, respectively unappetising and unrealistic, there was perhaps a third option. America had, after all, been here before. FDR’s New Deal too had been hemmed in. It had delivered far less than promised, until the floodgates were finally opened by the Second World War. The Great Depression, Krugman wrote, ‘ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler. He created a human catastrophe, which also led to a lot of government spending.’ ‘Economics,’ he wrote in another essay, ‘is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished.’

‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ If 21st-century America needed an enemy, China was one candidate. On foreign policy, Krugman is perhaps best described as a left patriot. Where he had once downplayed the impact of Chinese imports on the US economy, he now declared that China’s currency policy was America’s enemy: by manipulating its exchange rate Beijing was dumping exports on America. But to Krugman’s frustration Obama never turned the pivot towards Asia into a concerted economic strategy.

You might argue that in Covid we have found an enemy of precisely the kind Krugman was imagining. As far as Europe is concerned, an alien space invasion isn’t an implausible model for Covid. This novel threat broke down inhibitions in Berlin, and the Eurozone’s response was far more ambitious than it was after 2008. But America isn’t the Eurozone. For all Krugman’s gloom, it didn’t take a new world war to flip the economic policy switch. All it took was an election. Almost immediately after Trump’s victory in November 2016, the fiscal taps were opened. As under Reagan in the 1980s and Bush in the 2000s, all fear of deficits disappeared.

Compelling as Krugman may have found the Kaleckian vision, it does not describe the United States in the 21st century. The balance of class forces Kalecki had assumed in the 1940s no longer exists. In America in 2017 big business did not object to running the economy hot. There was no real threat of wage pressure: a flutter of strikes perhaps, but nothing serious. No chance of inflationary expectations becoming embedded in adjustments to the cost of living. No wage-price spiral. Everything to gain from tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The Kaleckian scenario, from today’s point of view, presumed too much countervailing force from the left and by the same token too many constraints on active economic policy.

Trump opened a new era of voluntarism in economic policy. You really could do what you liked. Neither external threats in the form of bond market vigilantes, nor domestic counterpressure in the form of contending social classes, were any longer effective constraints. American conservatives had never been as keen on the slogan There Is No Alternative as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. Under Trump there was simply no limit to the GOP’s opportunism. Typically, the centre and left did more intellectual work to come to terms with the new situation. The IMF’s former chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, had painstakingly demonstrated the sustainability of much higher levels of debt in a world of low interest rates. Meanwhile, Modern Monetary Theory had its moment in the sun. Blending state theories of money, radical Keynesianism of 1940s vintage and inside knowledge of the plumbing of the modern financial markets, MMT argued that debt wasn’t a problem at all. The only limit on an expansionary economic policy should be the inflation rate; otherwise the overriding priority should be full employment.

It’s telling that despite the apparent political affinity between Krugman and the proponents of MMT, its heresies revived his impulse to play policeman. After long and fruitless exchanges, Krugman declared that MMT was either silly or merely old-fashioned Keynesianism warmed over. In 2020 these doctrinal debates were overtaken by the reality of the Covid shock. In March 2020, as more than twenty million Americans lost their jobs in a matter of weeks, Congress united around a gigantic fiscal stimulus. At the Fed, the centrist Republican Jerome Powell embarked on a programme of intervention that dwarfed anything contemplated by Bernanke. And with a Democratic majority in Congress the impetus has carried through to 2021. The mantra on everyone’s lips is a blunt statement of Krugman’s position. Do not repeat the mistakes of the early Obama administration. Go large. If the Republicans have now decided to be fiscal conservatives, ignore them. There has been no opposition from big business. What the Chamber of Commerce did not like was the $15 minimum wage. Once that was dropped, it did not oppose the $1.9 trillion plan; it seems that business fears legislative intervention more than it does Kalecki-style pressure in the labour market.

The Krugmanification of the Democrats wasn’t won without a fight. There are fiscal hawks in Biden’s entourage. At one point he even counted Larry Summers as an adviser. That didn’t last: the empowered left wing of the Dems wouldn’t stand for it. But although he is no longer in the inner circle, Summers hasn’t surrendered. Opposing untargeted stimulus checks, calling for more focus on investment, he recently declared the Biden administration’s fiscal policy the most irresponsible in forty years – the result, he remarked bitterly, of the leverage handed to the left of the Democratic Party by the absolute refusal of the GOP to co-operate.

The first instinct of the wonks inside the Biden administration is to counter Summers’s arguments on his own terms. Their models show, they insist, that the risks of overheating and inflation are slight. What they don’t say is that being credibly committed to running the economy hot is precisely the point. This is what Krugman meant in 1998 when he called on the Bank of Japan to make a credible commitment to irresponsibility. To avoid the risk of a liquidity trap what you want to encourage is precisely a general belief that inflation is set to pick up. In the late 1990s Krugman, like a good New Keynesian, envisioned monetary and fiscal policy as substitutes for each other. In 2021 America is getting a massive dose of both. As the Fed announced in August last year, the plan is to get inflation above 2 per cent and to dry out the labour market. The bond markets may flinch, but if the sell-off gets too bad, the Fed can always buy more bonds.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 10, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

The shocking revelations from former acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen about former president Trump’s direct efforts to use the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election, along with the horrors of spiking Covid among the unvaccinated, drove out of the news cycle a revelatory piece of news.

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor released the jobs report for August 2021. It was stronger than economists had predicted, and even stronger than the administration had hoped.

In July, employers added 943,000 jobs, and unemployment fell to 5.4%. Average hourly wages increased, as well. They are 4% higher than they were a year ago.

Harvard Professor Jason Furman, former chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, tweeted: “I have yet to find a blemish in this jobs report. I've never before seen such a wonderful set of economic data.” He noted the report showed “Job gains in most sectors... Big decline in unemployment rate, even bigger for Black & Hispanic/Latino… Red[uctio]n in long-term unemp[loyment]... Solid (nominal) wage gains.”

“Still a long way to go,” he wrote. “[W]e're about 7.5 million jobs short of where we should have been right now absent the pandemic. But we've made a lot of progress.”

Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays, told New York Times reporter Nelson D. Schwartz: “It’s an unambiguously positive report…. Labor market conditions are strong. Unemployment benefits, infection risks and child care constraints are not preventing robust hiring.”

The jobs report is an important political marker because it appears to validate the Democrats’ approach to the economy, the system the president calls the “Biden Plan.” That plan started in January, as soon as Biden took office, using the federal government to combat the coronavirus pandemic as aggressively as the administration could and, at the same time, using federal support to restart the economy.

In March 2021, the Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package. In addition to strengthening healthcare systems to combat the coronavirus, it provides economic relief primarily to low- and middle-income Americans by extending unemployment benefits and the child tax credit; funding schools, housing, and local governments; providing help for small businesses; and so on.

Polls indicated that the measure was enormously popular. A Morning Consult poll from February showed that 3 out of 4 voters liked it, and local governments and state governors, including a number of Republicans, backed the bill.

But every single Republican lawmaker in the House of Representatives voted against the measure, saying it was too expensive and that it was unnecessary.

Since 1980, Republican lawmakers have opposed government intervention to stimulate the economy, insisting that private investment is more efficient. Rather than use the government as presidents of both parties from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter did to keep the playing field level and promote growth, modern-day Republicans have argued that the government should simply cut taxes in order to free up capital for wealthier Americans to invest. This, they said, would create enough growth to make up for lost tax revenues.

President Ronald Reagan began this trend with major tax cuts in 1981 and 1986. President George H.W. Bush promised not to raise taxes—remember “Read my lips: No new taxes”—but found he had to increase revenues to address the skyrocketing deficits the Reagan cuts created. When he did agree to higher taxes, his own party leaders turned against him. Then President George W. Bush cut taxes again in 2001 and 2003, despite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2017, Republicans under President Donald Trump cut taxes still further.

In 2017, Trump claimed the cut would be “rocket fuel for the economy.” Then–Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed almost 40 years of Republican ideology when he said: "The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth." And then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "After eight straight years of slow growth and underperformance, America is ready to take off.” (In fact, while Trump’s tax cuts meant tax revenues dropped 31%, they yielded only 2.9% growth, the exact same as the economy enjoyed in 2015, before the cuts.)

Laws like the American Rescue Plan should, in the Republicans’ view, destroy the economy. But Friday’s booming jobs report, along with the reality that the Biden administration has created an average of 832,000 new jobs per month, knocks a serious hole in that argument.

It may be that the pendulum is swinging away from the Republican conviction that tax cuts and private investment are the only key to economic growth.

Today, the Senate passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill by a vote of 69 to 30. The bill repairs roads and bridges, invests in transit and railroads, replaces lead pipes, and provides broadband across the country, among other things. In the next ten years, it is expected to create nearly 3 million jobs.

Nineteen Republicans voted in favor of the bill. There were many reasons to do so. The measure is popular with voters, and Republicans were embarrassed by their unanimous opposition to the American Rescue Plan. Indicating a willingness to work with Democrats might also undercut the Republicans’ image as obstructionists and help to protect the filibuster (a factor I’m guessing was behind McConnell’s yes vote).

But that Republicans felt they needed to abandon their position and vote yes for any reason is a big deal. "For the Republicans who supported this bill, you showed a lot of courage,” Biden told them. “And I want to personally thank you for that."

The bill now goes to the House, which will take it up after the Senate passes a $3.5 trillion infrastructure measure through the reconciliation process, which Democrats can do with a simple majority and without Republican support. The larger package addresses climate change, child care, elder care, housing, and so on. Moody Analytics, which provides economic research and modeling, says that, if it is combined with the bipartisan bill, it will add close to 2 million jobs a year over the next ten years.

Yet, Republicans say it is a “reckless tax and spending spree.”

In contrast, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said: “My largest concern is not: What are the risks if we make these big investments? It is: What is the cost if we don’t?”

—-

Notes:

https://www.bls.gov/bls/history/home.htm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/explainer-5-key-takeaways-from-the-july-jobs-report/2021/08/06/97dff92a-f6f3-11eb-a636-18cac59a98dc_story.html

Jason Furman @jasonfurmanI have yet to find a blemish in this jobs report. I've never before seen such a wonderful set of economic data: --Job gains in most sectors --Big decline in unemployment rate, even bigger for Black & Hispanic/Latino --Redn in long-term unemp --Solid (nominal) wage gains2,735 Retweets10,265 Likes

August 6th 2021

https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/24/covid-stimulus-support-poll/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/business/economy/july-2021-jobs-report.html

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-2003-bush-tax-cuts

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540931/2-years-later-trump-tax-cuts-have-failed-to-deliver-on-gops-promises

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/06/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-july-jobs-report/

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/10/1026081880/senate-passes-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/10/senate-passes-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-503265

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/politics/infrastructure-bill-explained/index.html

https://www.moodysanalytics.com/-/media/article/2021/macroeconomic-consequences-infrastructure.pdf

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/08/10/senate-passes-infrastructure-bill-bipartisan-support/5539281001/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/04/yellen-says-enacting-bidens-agenda-key-to-keeping-america-as-worlds-pre-eminent-economic-power.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[yourreddancer]

From Bernie Sanders

It is no secret that our nation faces enormous needs.

We have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last century. More than 90 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured. Seniors lack the dental, hearing and vision care they desperately need, and as a country we pay more for prescription drugs than any other developed country in the world.

Over 500,000 of our people are homeless and more than 18 million households are paying more than 50 percent of their limited incomes on housing. At the same time our child care system is dysfunctional and enormously expensive, and we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of any major nation.

Many of our teachers are underpaid and are forced to teach in schools with broken chairs, flooded classrooms, and inadequate support staff. Meanwhile, too many young adults either cannot afford to get a higher education or enter the workforce with obscene amounts of debt.

Our roads and bridges are crumbling and we need to rebuild our water systems, wastewater treatment plants, broadband, and other aspects of our physical infrastructure.

And all of this is occurring while the existential threat of climate change has already ushered in an era with more floods, more extreme weather, more wildfires, more drought, more ocean acidification, more disease, more lost economic activity, and threatens the very habitability of our planet for future generations.

In other words, we live in an unprecedented moment in history, and there is an enormous amount of work that has to be done.

The good news is that the $3.5 trillion Reconciliation Bill written by the Budget Committee is a serious effort at addressing these and other long-neglected crises. And while this compromise budget is less than I had wanted, this proposal will be the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.

The bad news is, passing this legislation will not be easy. It will require taking on the greed and power of corporate America and the billionaire class who have enormous control over what goes on in Washington. It is no secret that they will do everything they can to protect their profits and maintain the status quo in this country.

We are taking on a pharmaceutical industry that has spent $4.7 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions over the past 20 years, an average of almost $250 million per year. And just last week, they launched another seven-figure ad buy against provisions that would save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and lower the cost of drugs by 50 percent by having Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices — savings that will be used to cover the dental care, hearing aids and eyeglasses seniors desperately need — an idea that a recent Kaiser poll found enjoys the support of almost 90 percent of the American people. Now I get that the pharmaceutical industry owns the Republican Party and that no Republican will vote for this legislation, but there is no excuse for Democrats not supporting it.

We are taking on a fossil fuel industry that, between 2000 and 2016, spent more than $2 billion lobbying against legislation to protect our planet from climate change, and has only ramped up the pace of their efforts since then. They too recently launched a major advertising effort against the bill that would finally take on the threat of climate change by transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy — while creating good-paying jobs for working people and young people.

We are taking on business lobbyists that have described our bill as an “existential threat” because at a time when the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing wider, when two people own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent, and when some of the wealthiest people and biggest businesses pay nothing in federal income taxes, we are asking the billionaire class and large profitable corporations to finally pay their fair share in taxes.

That, and more, is what we are up against. In this legislation we are taking on the entire American ruling class who will do everything they can to protect their wealth and power.

This fight will not be easy.

Money dominates almost everything that goes on in Congress.

Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the coal and oil companies, the health care industry, agribusiness and the rest of corporate America spend billions every year not just on campaign contributions, but also on lobbying. And they get what they pay for: the desires of the rich and powerful are well-attended to while the pain of working families is ignored.

But I believe this time could be different.

Yes. I believe this time we can overcome the insatiable greed that exists in much of corporate America.

Yes. I believe we can take on the fossil fuel industry, effectively combat climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

Yes. I believe we can take on the pharmaceutical companies and end the international disgrace of being the only country that allows the drug companies to charge whatever they want for prescription drugs, while making sure seniors get the vision, dental, and hearing aids they need.

Yes. I believe we can take on the billionaire class, finally make them start paying their fair share of taxes, and tell them, “No, you can’t have it all. You can’t continue to have huge tax breaks while children go hungry, while people can’t afford medicine, while seniors can’t chew their food, while our planet burns.”

No. We will not be able to accomplish any of these goals through this Reconciliation Bill if we look at this process as a spectator sport, assuming others — especially those in Congress — will do it for us without your participation.

They won’t.

The future is in your hands. So make your voice heard — help me tell my colleagues that yes, people are tuned into this reconciliation debate, and want action:

Please add your name to tell Congress it is time to prioritize the needs of people who don’t know how to manipulate the system like the billionaire class of this country and pass the $3.5 trillion compromise Reconciliation Bill that will finally address the real pain of people in this country while saving our planet for future generations.

Humanity is at a crossroads. We can either continue down the current path of greed, consumerism, oligarchy, war, racism, and environmental degradation. Or we can lead the world in moving in a very different direction.

The choice is ours.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

[nicklloydnow]

“In the case of Afghanistan, America’s refusal to countenance the return of Zahir Shah may well have proved to be their greatest failure of imagination yet.

(…)

We were ushered into the garden room, there, on cane furniture, sat two old men. One, slightly-sunken of face but alert and with a smile waltzing over his lips, the other of a more military bearing. Dust eddied in the shafts of light as we passed, then settled as we did. We were visiting the 86 year old Zahir Shah, King of Afghanistan for 40 years between 1933 and 1973. With him was Lieutenant-General Sardar Abdul Wali Khan, who acted as an interpreter, it was entirely unnecessary as the King would answer in accurate though halting English.

We were there to discover if the old man was interested, or even able, to take up the reins again. His time as monarch (ended in a palace coup by his cousin, Mohamed Daud) had been one of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the mountain kingdom. In the late 1960s he introduced a new democratic constitution. Amongst other things, it guaranteed women’s rights and elections. He was also someone who was able to garner loyalty not just from his native Pashtun people, but from the Hazara, Tajik and Uzbeck minorities and the confidence of many of the regional powers.

The exiled king spoke of his visceral love for the country. That and his deep sadness. How, from his Roman exile he had seen his land first became a dictatorship after a palace coup, then a Soviet satellite state, ending in a Soviet inspired coup, the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the civil war that saw the death of 400,000 of its citizens between 1979 and the fall of the Taliban. Estimates suggest upwards of 10 per cent of the entire population were killed during that period, a salutary realisation that even 20 years ago Afghanistan had been a killing field for the previous 20 years.

(…)

These events had not dimmed the king’s desire to do what he could for the nation. He had told us he would do anything to secure peace. As he went on to do. Within a week of our meeting, he had made an informal agreement with the anti-Taliban Mujahedeen of the Northern Alliance.

(…)

At this point things were looking promising for a return of the king. But Pakistani Intelligence, the ISI, was uncomfortable with the prospect of a moderate in power in Afghanistan, and was even less happy by the combination of a Pashtun king, with the support of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara dominated Northern Alliance having political power.

Zahir at no time demanded the throne — indeed the Tajik, former President and leader of the Jamiat-e Islami rejected the idea out of hand — his offer was to convene a Loya Jorga, a gathering of all the tribal notables to create a new constitution. In November of that year the Bonn conference, which included all Afghan factions barring the Taliban, supported him as the interim leader.

And yet, by the time Zahir returned to Kabul with Hamed Karzi, the US had gone completely cold on the idea. Now their chosen man was Karzai, soon after American-led forces had driven the Taliban out of Kabul in 2002. It is clear that the US’s retreat from supporting the monarchical option was in part driven by their ties with the Pakistani ISI, for years they had starved the moderate Afghan nationalist Haq of support whilst feeding the Islamist factions of the Northern alliance.

(…)

The US, though it was aware of the possibilities of an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem, and a solution that could have utilised the residual loyalty of the Afghan peoples, decided against. The rest is dour, bloody history.”

“All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN or FOX, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – “Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire” and “Nemesis” – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.”

“We waged war in Afghanistan - twenty years of war, thousands of American lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost, over 2 trillion dollars spent - but we did not wage peace. We went, we fought, we supported a corrupt Afghan government almost as abusive to the people there as the Taliban had been, we droned, we bombed, we tried to build an army of some of the historically best fighters in the world in the image of the American armed forces (so arrogant are we), we tried to build an Afghanistan in the image of our own country (so delusional are we) - and yeah, we did some good things too. In the end, we aren’t just the last in a long line of empires defeated in Afghanistan. Even worse, we’re the last in a long line of empires that raped and plundered it before we left.

God help us, if we don’t learn from this.”