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#actually it’s about anyone earning disproportionate amounts of money
itechscripts2 · 2 years
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Drain of Care Service
In the past, the traditional ratio of caregivers to seniors in need for care was seven to one, says Nora Super, executive director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, part of the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Family size has shrunk, and parents are often scattered across the country. She says they lack the built-in network of family members that was available when people lived in the same city for generations. So the ratio is actually falling with a forecast of four to one by 2030.
The unpaid role can put tremendous pressure on someone who is already facing multiple commitments. Family carers often can’t juggle all the responsibilities. Of course, many have children alone, have to care for aging parents or have full-time jobs.
There are inequalities in the balance of care. According to Super, this has a disproportionate impact on low-income demographics who earn hourly wages or (work) in a gig economy. The health issues that can cause people to need care also have an uneven impact. Many of these diseases, especially Alzheimer’s disease, disproportionately affect people of color, particularly black Americans and Latinos.
Eventually, family care can become unsustainable. Super says what usually happens when someone burns out completely or can’t make it work, then they actually have to put their family member in a nursing home. So by providing services you can save money in the long run because those people can take a break, go on vacation or something and come back.
This can ultimately reduce nursing home expenses that Medicaid might otherwise have to meet.
Most people really want to take care of their loved ones, says Super. But it’s also exhausting.
Benefits of preventive care:
Relief also offers benefits for the person being cared for. It’s one caregiver who’s refreshed, says Markwood. One who can care and who is able to be there and be present. When a caregiver gets a chance to breathe a little, it’s renewed on both sides, she says.
With a break, caregivers can go to their own doctor’s appointments, buy groceries or watch a child’s soccer game. Or he’s going away for the weekend so they can just hang out with other family members or go to college. Rest is simply making sure your loved one is safe so they can go and do things that are important in their life without worrying about the care their loved one is receiving all the time.
Bradley Bursack agrees everyone can benefit from a breather. The misconception is that when we take time off, our loved ones lose. But what matters is what they gain by taking better care of ourselves.
At first, continuing the routine uninterrupted might seem less complicated. If it’s a small amount and you can arrange it with a sibling, if you can even do it and not everyone can, it can mean a lot.
Acute care costs:
Respite care can be expensive. Although prices vary by type of care and location, these are average costs:
Day care for adults:
The average daily rate for up to eight hours in adult child care centers in the United States is $78, according to Genworth Financial’s 2021 Cost of Care Study. The availability of these services has been “decimated” by the pandemic. So check with local suppliers before making plans.
Help for life:
According to the Genworth survey, the average rate for a day in an assisted living facility is $148. However, respite care may sometimes not be available and a minimum length of stay may be required.
Acute home care:
The average cost for a home nurse is $27 per hour or $169 per week.
Respite Care Challenges:
People may resist being cared for by anyone other than their comforting family caregiver, at least initially. This reluctance can be reinforced when recovery involves a brief stay in an assisted living facility.
Bradley Bursack says: “I’m a little suspicious because I’ve seen so many people leave their homes for a care facility and if they don’t really understand it’s just for a few days, that’s a huge adjustment.”
Fear of adjusting your loved one can keep you from relaxing and defeat the purpose of rest. However, it can work.
Your loved one’s cognitive state affects their ability to understand the situation. Ideally, you can explain to them how this temporary stay allows them to get insulin injections if needed or to be safe from falls during the brief separation, says Bradley Bursack.
Hiring a home care provider might be an easier option. As with most aspects of nursing, she adds, there are no ready-made answers or solutions.
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The actual NC Lottery Today, Exciting North Carolina Lottery Data
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mi lottery Nc Lottery History
To the north Carolina's lotto is some sort of notably fresh lottery. Within fact, this lotto on the internet came into existence merely soon after state legislation building the actual lottery was agreed upon throughout 2005.
mi lottery
This lotto came to be with one function: to make funds for training. It is reflected in the particular official brand of typically the lottery, which is often the "North Carolina Education Lotto. "
According to the actual NC lotto website, completely of lotto proceeds proceed towards buying into the california's education courses. Lottery people who no longer win may find solace from the point of view in which their money is planning to educating the commanders involving tomorrow.
What Is usually the NC Lotto Dollars Being Spent On?
50 percent of the proceeds move in direction of reducing class dimensions rates for young young children, so lecturers can present each child much more personal attention.
40% moves in the direction of school construction as well as maintenance. More schools indicate a lesser amount of crowding for increasing scholar population, and fixes can easily reduce safety hazards and also improve the quality connected with the past or present student's education natural environment.
The remaining 10% associated with the proceeds goes toward college scholarships. These resources will go to Pell Scholarhip students, which are generally students through lower cash flow backgrounds. These scholars could use their scholarship dollars to help pay their own educational costs at any Northern Carolina colleges, no matter if non-public or public.
What Are generally the NC Parte Regulations?
The North Carolina lotto provides two main varieties of lottery.
Instant scratch-offs usually are cards with quick video games that can be enjoyed by damaging away the particular coverings about different parts of the card. The policies of each game change, asking for themes from online games such as tic-tac-toe and crossword vague ideas.
Generally, scratch-offs possess a reasonably high succeed probability nevertheless smaller pay-offs. Lottery images are typically the other type of lotto.
North Carolina has Decide on several, Pick 4, Dollars your five, Powerball, and Ultra Thousands lottery drawings. The particular rules of each one drawing are different, but every single has often the same basic principles.
Offenses for the drawings can certainly be purchased with a lot of retail locations, specially advantage stores like 7-11. In addition there are many online lottery ticketed sellers who buy seat tickets, check results, and take care of winnings payments for their particular people. It is often a good idea in order to check the the repute of a online lottery site ahead of using its services.
Relying on the pulling, NORTH CAROLINA lottery players decide on involving 3 and some quantities, with the available quantity range varying from painting to drawing.
Other specifics to consider are solution price tag (opting to shell out more improves winning potential), drawing particular date, play variety (basically what number of numbers want to match since precisely what order), and the variety of times the chosen statistics will be played. The idea is possible to participate in several drawings with a new one ticket.
Players may watch results on TELEVISION SET or by way of announcements on-line. Lotto winning trades should indicator their priced to protect against others from proclaiming the idea and contact the actual lotto officials through the amount on the ticket. Via there, members usually have got a choice between in the long run payments over several decades or possibly a comparatively smaller swelling sum payment.
While odds of winning a sketching are pretty small (there's a 1 in 195, 249, 054 chance regarding winning the particular Powerball jackpot), the affiliate payouts are significant enough to create instantaneous millionaires.
Past NC Lotto Winners
One North Carolina lotto couple showed anyone the real meaning of suspense any time they reported a $1 million lotto prize a single day before the contract. Nervous about the interest coming from winning, Raleigh Mountain, typically the lucky NC lotto victorious one, stalled for several weeks and secured his plane ticket by camouflaging it with a variety of spots, which include his Bible.
Yet another NORTH CAROLINA lottery winner, Marsha McCain, was able to be able to clear away all involving the girl debts after successful $465.21, 000 dollars. Inside addition to eliminating the woman debts, she had the ability to order land and are still job as a chef.
Becky Ozmun, a convenience retail store owner who sells lotto tickets, won a 12 jackpots from scratch-off entry pass on a period of 15 months. One among her earnings was a $150, 000 prize.
NC Lotto Fraudulence
With its relatively limited history, the NC lotto hasn't seen much lotto ticket fraud.
However, there was a lot of focus placed on often the occurrence of lottery ticketed jackpots among lottery stores. Right now there are multiple store keepers just like Becky Ozmun who have have earned an earlier mentioned average amount of NORTH CAROLINA lottery money.
The Vermont lottery started tracking regardless of whether winners are involved within lottery solution retail inside 2008.
For the moment, while succeeding rates amid retailers may well seem disproportionate, lotto officers have so far viewed no concrete evidence connected with fraudulence. NC lottery gamers should directly verify lotto leads to avoid being swindled by simply retailers who can easily claim the ticket is actually a loser and then after cash it throughout.
Upper Carolina Lottery Trivia
4. Lottery wins can often be cause of depression. N . Carolina has a lotto policy requiring that lotto winnings first go to paying off a winner's residual debts. For example of this, hundreds of thousands associated with NC lottery dollars have become towards paying off baby assist.
* Lottery profits, similar to financial transactions, tend to be at the mercy of taxes.
* Playslips from their states cannot always be used in New york.
Precisely what if there was any strategy you can actually use to earn the NORTH CAROLINA lottery?
My spouse and i know it seems cynical, but there is some sort of method designed that will be proven to be a lot more effective at that time guessing figures yourself.
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daleclevenger · 3 years
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Basics of online 사다리사이트검증 sports betting
If you’re thinking about getting 사다리사이트검증 커뮤니티 into online sports betting, knowing some of the fundamental phrases, slang, and jargon will assist. Although there are several words and phrases with which you should be aware, the following are some of the most important:
A bet or wager of any type is an action.
SPREAD (or POINTSPREAD): Also known as the “line” or “handicap.” For betting reasons, it’s the additional points or head start given to the underdog team or player at the start of the game. It is often established by a sports book and is intended to “level the playing field.” The favorite must win by more points than the spread to win. tobogladder.com
FUTURES BET: A futures bet is a wager on an event that will occur in the future, and it is generally a game with several contestants, such as a car race.
ACCUMULATOR or PARLAY: A form of multiple bet that is placed all at once and advances as long as the bets are won. If you win the first event, for example, the wager “rolls over” to the following event.
HEDGING: Betting on both sides of a bet to ensure a win.
MONEY LINE: An event’s odds without a pointspread. A negative or positive symbol is used to express it. A negative sign indicates the amount of money you must risk in order to win $100. The higher the stakes, the better the team.
PROPOSITION Wager, SPECIAL BET, or EXOTIC BET: A unique form of bet available on many sports betting services, with the event not necessarily being a sporting event. It may be political in some situations, such as predicting who will win the next election. Money Line bets are the most common type of wager.
Using Expert 엔트리 사다리사이트검증 Betting Advice to Win at Sports Betting
It makes no difference whether sport or sports a person follows; if the bookmaker is advertising a price, we can all be sure of one thing. The price he is asking does not accurately represent the likelihood of that result occurring.
There is a common adage that there is no such thing as a bad bookie. This is likely due to the fact that, unlike his customer, the bookmaker does not take chances. To establish a balanced book, he will offer an odds-on price for what should truly be an evens bet, then lay it off someplace else. The bookmaker earns a substantial profit regardless of whether horse crosses the finish line first or which club wins the major Saturday afternoon Premier League match.
In reality, this means that, as the adage goes, the punter must run to stand still. To put it another way, to be ahead on the deal, one must win a disproportionate number of times, taking into account the house edge that is always there. In the long run, guesswork will always lose out, but the expert has a fighting chance. But how many of us can truly claim to be experts?
Most of us consider ourselves to be experts in one or more fields. Sports bettors frequently make the fatal mistake of underestimating the amount of study and information, sometimes insider knowledge that goes into the bookmaker’s pricing setting.
Everything You Need 메이저토토사이트 to Know About Sports Betting
The bulk of the more established bookies employ their own linesmakers (also known as oddsmakers), whose duty it is to determine the proper price for each sporting event’s outcome – and then offer the consumer anything less. When it comes to determining their own prices, the majority of lesser books just follow the larger ones’ lead.
A good tipping service with a track record of performance over a long period of time can assist you in overcoming the obstacles. It’s apparent that a service that doesn’t charge you until you succeed is much better.
Those who are knowledgeable 메이저 사다리사이트검증 about sports betting and can prove it upon request can offer you with the necessary information and betting recommendations to help you flip the house edge around and generate a consistent but predictable profit over time. Naturally, this does not indicate that you will always win; rather, your wins will surpass your losses over the medium to long term.
Tipsters frequently gather information from other tipsters, as well as from their own contacts within the sports in which they specialize. The evidence, as always, is in the pudding.
Anyone thinking about hiring a sports betting tipster service should seek for proof of its prior success and assess the benefits and drawbacks. In the end, it can determine whether you succeed or fail.
Expectations 오래된 사다리사이트검증 in Sports Betting
On the Internet, you may find handicappers claiming to hit 75 or 80 percent of their games. These individuals aren’t handicappers; they’re salesman, and what they’ve done is instilled in the minds of new sports bettors the belief that in order to make money betting on sports, you need to achieve that high of a percentage.
They’ve developed a complete misunderstanding of what it takes to succeed in this industry. Many gamblers today believe that winning less than 70-75 percent of their bets is pointless, which is a total myth. Most sports bettors now have excessive expectations, believing that if they don’t hit at a ridiculously high %, they are failing in sports betting, which is just not true.
Over a lengthy period of time, true pros aim to hit 58-60 percent of their wagers. And anyone who tells you that hitting at that speed won’t make you a lot of money is lying. Over the course of my work, I’ve analyzed winning percentages and discovered that reaching 60% is not only beneficial, but can also lead to mountains of cash. Take, for example, Billy Walters, the most successful sports gambler of all time, who has said publicly that his objective is to hit 60% of the time throughout any given season. If you manage your money wisely, 6 out of 10 times your money will compound into astronomical riches.
I discovered that if you bet 5% of your bankroll on one game a day and hit 60%, you could be a multi-millionaire utilizing an economic principle called the time value of money. However, if you keep hitting at that rate, sports bookmakers all around the world would ultimately limit your activity, so it’s not a completely realistic expectation. The evidence, however, is in the pudding. Getting 60 percent of your games right can result in large sums of money.
There are just too many human factors at play to actually win at the rates claimed by certain scammers. Remember, you’re betting on people, not machines. Everyone would win 100 percent of the time if every game went according to plan. Lower your expectations and aim for a 60 percent win rate, and you’ll be a tremendous winner in sports betting. Also, keep in mind that sports betting is a long-term investment.
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tradecryotocurrency · 3 years
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What Is Bitcoin Mining?
Chances are you hear the phrase “bitcoin mining” and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isn’t too far off.
Bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems; these problems are so complex that they cannot be solved by hand and are complicated enough to tax even incredibly powerful computers.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle.
Bitcoin mining is necessary to maintain the ledger of transactions upon which bitcoin is based.
Miners have become very sophisticated over the last several years using complex machinery to speed up mining operations.
The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin (not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground). And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and secure by verifying its transaction information.
When someone sends bitcoin anywhere, it's called a transaction. Transactions made in-store or online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same thing by clumping transactions together in “blocks” and adding them to a public record called the “blockchain.” Nodes then maintain records of those blocks so that they can be verified into the future.
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin is not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called “double-spending.” With printed currencies, counterfeiting is always an issue. But generally, once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerk’s hands. With digital currency, however, it's a different story.
Digital information can be reproduced relatively easily, so with Bitcoin and other digital currencies, there is a risk that a spender can make a copy of their bitcoin and send it to another party while still holding onto the original.1
Special Considerations
Rewarding Bitcoin Miners
With as many as 300,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, verifying each of those transactions can be a lot of work for miners.2 As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the "block reward." The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks (or roughly every 4 years). In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, in 2018 it was 12.5, and in May of 2020, it was halved to 6.25.
Bitcoin successfully halved its mining reward—from 12.5 to 6.25—for the third time on May 11th, 2020.
This system will continue until around 2140.3 At that point, miners will be rewarded with fees for processing transactions that network users will pay. These fees ensure that miners still have the incentive to mine and keep the network going. The idea is that competition for these fees will cause them to remain low after halvings are finished.
These halvings reduce the rate at which new coins are created and, thus, lower the available supply. This can cause some implications for investors, as other assets with low supply—like gold—can have high demand and push prices higher. At this rate of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will reach a limit of 21 million, making the currency entirely finite and potentially more valuable over time.3
El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender on June 9, 2021.4 It is the first country to do so. The cryptocurrency can be used for any transaction where the business can accept it. The U.S. dollar continues to be El Salvador’s primary currency.
Verifying Bitcoin Transactions
In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they must verify one megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as one transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.
Second, in order to add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners must solve a complex computational math problem, also called a "proof of work." What they're actually doing is trying to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number, called a "hash," that is less than or equal to the target hash. Basically, a miner's computer spits out hashes at different rates—megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second (GH/s), or terahashes per second (TH/s)—depending on the unit, guessing all possible 64-digit numbers until they arrive at a solution. In other words, it's a gamble.
The difficulty level of the most recent block as of August 2020 is more than 16 trillion. That is, the chance of a computer producing a hash below the target is 1 in 16 trillion. To put that in perspective, you are about 44,500 times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot with a single lottery ticket than you are to pick the correct hash on a single try. Fortunately, mining computer systems spit out many hash possibilities. Nonetheless, mining for bitcoin requires massive amounts of energy and sophisticated computing operations.
The difficulty level is adjusted every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks, with the goal of keeping rates of mining constant.5 That is, the more miners there are competing for a solution, the more difficult the problem will become. The opposite is also true. If computational power is taken off of the network, the difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.
Bitcoin Mining Analogy
Say I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number, they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get.
Let's say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both theoretically arrived at viable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There is no 'extra credit' for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of 19.
Now imagine that I pose the 'guess what number I'm thinking of' question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer.
Not only do bitcoin miners have to come up with the right hash, but they also have to be the first to do it.
Because bitcoin mining is essentially guesswork, arriving at the right answer before another miner has almost everything to do with how fast your computer can produce hashes. Just a decade ago, bitcoin mining could be performed competitively on normal desktop computers. Over time, however, miners realized that graphics cards commonly used for video games were more effective and they began to dominate the game. In 2013, bitcoin miners started to use computers designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency as efficiently as possible, called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). These can run from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands but their efficiency in mining Bitcoin is superior.
Today, bitcoin mining is so competitive that it can only be done profitably with the most up-to-date ASICs. When using desktop computers, GPUs, or older models of ASICs, the cost of energy consumption actually exceeds the revenue generated. Even with the newest unit at your disposal, one computer is rarely enough to compete with what miners call "mining pools."
A mining pool is a group of miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin between participants. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. Mining pools and companies have represented large percentages of bitcoin's computing power.
Bitcoin vs. Traditional Currencies
Consumers tend to trust printed currencies. That’s because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank of the U.S., called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money, and the federal government prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency.6 7
Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company (such as Mastercard or Visa). In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason your debit or credit card may be suspended while traveling.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of computers across the world called “nodes.” This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few key differences. Nodes store information about prior transactions and help to verify their authenticity. Unlike those central authorities, however, bitcoin nodes are spread out across the world and record transaction data in a public list that can be accessed by anyone.
History of Bitcoin Mining
Between 1 in 16 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and the massive network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes.5 But it’s important to remember that 10 minutes is a goal, not a rule.
The bitcoin network is currently processing just under four transactions per second as of August 2020, with transactions being logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes.8 For comparison, Visa can process somewhere around 65,000 transactions per second.9 As the network of bitcoin users continues to grow, however, the number of transactions made in 10 minutes will eventually exceed the number of transactions that can be processed in 10 minutes. At that point, waiting times for transactions will begin and continue to get longer, unless a change is made to the bitcoin protocol.
This issue at the heart of the bitcoin protocol is known as “scaling.” While bitcoin miners generally agree that something must be done to address scaling, there is less consensus about how to do it. There have been two major solutions proposed to address the scaling problem. Developers have suggested either (1) creating a secondary "off-chain" layer to Bitcoin that would allow for faster transactions that can be verified by the blockchain later, or (2) increasing the number of transactions that each block can store. With less data to verify per block, the Solution 1 would make transactions faster and cheaper for miners. Solution 2 would deal with scaling by allowing for more information to be processed every 10 minutes by increasing block size.
In July 2017, bitcoin miners and mining companies representing roughly 80% to 90% of the network’s computing power voted to incorporate a program that would decrease the amount of data needed to verify each block.
The program that miners voted to add to the bitcoin protocol is called a segregated witness, or SegWit. This term is an amalgamation of Segregated, meaning “to separate,” and Witness, which refers to “signatures on a bitcoin transaction.” Segregated Witness, then, means to separate transaction signatures from a block — and attach them as an extended block. While adding a single program to the bitcoin protocol may not seem like much in the way of a solution, signature data has been estimated to account for up to 65% of the data processed in each block of transactions.
Less than a month later in August 2017, a group of miners and developers initiated a hard fork, leaving the bitcoin network to create a new currency using the same codebase as bitcoin. Although this group agreed with the need for a solution to scaling, they worried that adopting segregated witness technology would not fully address the scaling problem.
Instead, they went with Solution 2. The resulting currency, called “bitcoin cash,” increased the blocksize to 8 MB in order to accelerate the verification process to allow a performance of around 2 million transactions per day. On August 16, 2020, Bitcoin Cash was valued at about $302 to Bitcoin’s roughly $11,800.
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unchained--melody · 3 years
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Unpopular opinion, not enough people talk about how imperial and classist the legal immigration system in western countries are, and how as a result, the “diversity” that is formed within these “multicultural” western nations is likely to be distorted, and whatever culture, heritage, information, and viewpoints brought on my most legal immigrants is likely to not represent the vast majority of people from those non-western countries. This goes contrary to the liberal-democratic pride that America is multicultural because WE CHOSE TO BE, when in reality it is the nature of disproportionately positioned wealth that draws people from all over the world like ants drawn to a cake in the middle of a barren desert, and how we all know that the reason the cake is situated there and the rest of the desert is barren in the first place is because of colonization. Indeed, you cannot have colonization without the classism and eliteism of capitalism (and some would argue colonization is capitalism in its developed form, or merely capitalism on a global scale) and anyone who contends capitalism, colonialism, and racism are separate variables does not understand how the world works but let that partially be a topic for another essay.
In the case of the US, legal immigration takes a lot of money, ranging from $500K to $3 million, depending on your luck. This is within the global context that the average hourly wage of non-western countries is $2 per hour. I’m from/living in a non-western country that is relatively on the wealthier side, my family’s houshold earnings have for the past two decades been within the top 1% in the country with a current total asset of a million. But even with that, and this is true for the vast majority of people I have met who earn similar amounts, we don’t have enough money to immigrate to the United States and my parents can’t even dream of sending one of their two kids to a college in the US. My point is that in many ex-colonized non-western countries, raising enough money for immigration through income alone is extremely hard without old wealth to support you. In the numerous prep schools that I used to go to, the few people who had the privilege to study abroad and eventually / or immigrate to the US came from generational wealth that stemed from the colonial era, ie their ancestors had probably befriended slave-owners or other imperialist forces instead of getting exploited like the rest of the people in their country.
It is true that within western countries, legal immigrants of color face racial discrimination and can in no way be called a privileged class but it is still undeniable that a vast majority of them are, within their home country, a very privileged group that have benefitted from a legal immigration system inherently western-centered and colonial.
To go further, western immigration / visa systems in this form actually become vehicles for 21st century imperialism. A western passport or a western college degree acts as an invaluable class tokien in many developing countries, whose elite class already is likely to have ties to western wealth.
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hugh-hiab-leo · 3 years
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Interview with Dr. Sy Stokes on Police Brutality
The stakeholders in police brutality could be anyone but the issue seems to affect African Americans disproportionately as long as law enforcement has existed in the United States. Protests and activism seem to raise awareness and catalyze the justice system reaction to hold assailants accountable for their actions, such is with the Officer Chauvin case. One prominent activist is Dr. Sy Stokes who Black/Chinese postdoctoral fellow for the National Center for Institutional Diversity. His primary research is focused on campus racial climate and racial equity. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a BA in African American studies, earned his master's degree in higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his PhD in education at the University of Southern California (USC). He addressed many topics including Police Brutality, Defunding the Police, Anti-Asian Hate, and Respect for the Elderly. He sets up diversity meetings across the nation in Universities and Institutions and focuses on students’ response to racism on campus, and challenging history and tradition to educate the younger generation. He, along with 11 others including PhD students and faculty members, pioneered the Black Ruins Campaign in UCLA in which they directly challenged the University’s claim of being the most diverse school in the world. The data was later exposed on social media including YouTube which garnered millions of views. He talks about this in detail during the interview when we asked him what movements he has been part in. He encourages us, the youth, who often feel powerless in our social status to really use our power in social media, protests, and education. He says the youth are the best chance a movement has in changing the status quo. “Don’t be afraid to go against the grain” is what Dr. Stokes says. Police Brutality, Anti-Asian Hate, Sexism, and other forms of prejudice will always exist, however, progress must continue to move forward and that is done by activism and leading social change. 
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We had a chance to interview him on May 5, 2021 at the end of the meeting between 12:00pm - 2:00pm on zoom to answer us questions pertaining police brutality.
Interview Transcript:
Our Team: What have you been involved in besides what is on your description?
Dr. Stokes: ”I along with 11 other black activists at UCLA back in 2013, created the black ruins campaign. We took the university to task about the lack of black students at UCLA, I believe it was less than 4%, now it is 4% exactly. Its been a decade and hasn’t really changed much. But the reason why we went after the University is that we understood that UCLA kept boasting that it is the most diverse University in the world, has the most undergraduate applicants of any school in the world, so on. And we understood that, above all else, the most important two things of college universities is one, reputation, and two, is money. The reason I put them in that order is because when you have reputation, it doesn't matter if you have money, you will get that money, from donors and what not. So reputation is always number one. So we destroyed the reputation of this institution and really exposed what is going on behind closed doors. We took the data that was not available to the public and but we put together ourselves , we were able to make system change, because all of the sudden, it flips the status quo on its back, and it shows the world who they really are. The whole calpain worked and we got millions of views on YouTube, but most importantly, it created these mobilization campaigns in multiple universities. Here in University of Michigan with #BBUM, one in Harvard #ITOO, Mizzoui with the Hunger Strike in 2015 that was successful, and we kept seeing within that era the student activism, students were taking their universities to task by exposing what was happening behind closed doors. That can happen in any institution, and you must evaluate what is important to your institution, and figure out a way to leverage that. You cannot get fired like you are in a job, you are a student and you have a lot more power than you realize. You just need to come as a collective, you only need a few, for me it was 11 guys, 1 faculty liaison, and 2 other staff members and PhD students, that was it.  You don’t need many people, you just need a movement with a meaning behind it, that has data behind it, and that can really convince people the power of change...”
Discretion: *Casual filler words have been taken out to have a concise transcript that addresses the relevant issue; only condensed factoid beyond this point of the interview*
Our Team:  Why do we see frequent cases of police brutality in recent years?
Dr. Stokes: “It is not that police brutality cases are drastically increasing by the years. But, use of phones to record such incidents has elucidated many cases to the media where we all can see. Police brutality is happening everywhere at all times, and the George Floyd case would not have been significant if it was not recorded. The increasing awareness of the youth to participate in organized protests and challenging the local jurisdictions to hold the aggressors [cops] accountable brings a lot of media attention that we did not get before. You cannot stop an individual cop who is corrupt or a “bad apple” but when the system under which they work in is also corrupt and is not held accountable in the face of justice, then that is when police brutality cases increase because there is no repercussion for the actions of the cops. No consequence, no care.”
Our Team: What is your stance on defunding the police?
Dr. Stokes: “US police spending ranks third among world wide military expenditures with $118 billion a year. In Portland, OR African Americans were arrested at a rate of 4.73:1 to white people for non-violent crimes. A third of the city budget is allocated to the city’s law enforcement. While the remainder is allocated towards housing, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, education funding, job training and job creation, accessible healthcare, domestic abuse and sexual assault clinics and resources, aging and disability services, youth programs, among other things. But a third of the entire budget goes to law enforcement. The state legislature is engineering the conditions of poverty which comes with inevitable crime, increased homelessness and substance abuse, the state claims they need more funding for militarized police force to control these outcomes. Defunding the police would actually make law enforcement jobs easier, if city officials allocated these funds towards resources within the community. Officers wouldn't have to be tasked to respond to every societal problem imaginable. The reason defunding the police doesn’t happen, is that the dominant power established the system as it is and made the population believe it is the best solution, so even imagining anything to better the community is seen as idealistic or radical. More cops is not going to fix deep issues that plague are communities.”
Our Team: What can we do instead (less police officers)?
Dr. Stokes: When the funding for police officers is reduced, the money can be allocated towards education, housing, rehabilitation, mental health help, and providing resources for historically marginalized communities. A decrease in crime will follow due to the reduced rate of poverty and better education. Defunding the police does not mean eradicating police completely because crime will always exist. But as it is today, unnecessary amount of police officers are employed and there is little funding for mental health professionals that could help individuals with mental issues rather than cops with guns blazing. In terms of our safety, Don’tCallThePolice.com has hotlines in every city in the United States for issues in housing, domestic abuse and sexual assault, stalking, mental health issues, crime, and substance abuse. Instead of only officers showing up, mental health professionals come first and in the case of mental health and crime with a few cops. This way the individuals participating are not taken to jail immediately, but first given help and the cops are there for last resort of violence.”
Our Team: “What advice do you have for young adults, students, and youth like ourselves who are at different levels of awareness but are seeking to make change in racial relations in our University and possibly America?
Dr. Stokes: “ I would recommend the book ‘Faces of the bottom of the Well’ that talks about racial realism in which America was built on racism and we may never see the end of racism ever. As pessimistic as it sounds, however, we cannot fold or give up. When we engage in defunding the police, or even have organized protests, they [people in power] don't want us to do that, they don’t want to see us in the street in powerful numbers, they hated seeing it last year [George Floyd protest] because they understood that we are standing against the grain. Even though we should accept racial realism, we can still push back over and over again because we know at least for the next generation, it may get better. Just like for our older generation, they understood assimilation is not the answer and they combated and resisted until we reached here. There is no perfect. But we must always pave a better path for each generation by resisting and fighting to make the world a better place in terms of public safety and freedom. 
Work Cited
Beschizza, R. (2021, April 20). U.S. policing budgets would rank as the world's third-highest military expenditure. Boing Boing. https://boingboing.net/2021/04/20/u-s-policing-budgets-would-rank-as-the-worlds-third-highest-military-expenditure.html.
Resources by city. Don't Call The Police. (2021, April 22). https://dontcallthepolice.com/.
Turner, N., & Justice, V. I. of. (2020, June 8). What Policing Costs: A Look at Spending in America's Biggest Cities. Vera Institute of Justice. https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities.
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tripsonflatground · 3 years
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People conflate profit with hard work and importance. I’m not saying people don’t understand what those terms mean, but I am saying that they find a connection that simply isn’t there - and they don’t find it on their own, they are led to it by the upper echelons of society in order to keep capitalism and the social classes that they’ve invented intact.
Entertainment industry employees (the select few famous ones, not the lighting staff and the video crew and the sound tech and everyone else in the credits no one really cares about, even Marvel fans - yes, I’m a Marvel fan, I know, you don’t watch until the end for the people, you wait for the bonus content), major league professional athletes (usually the male ones), and CEOS & company founders have something in common: they get high paychecks because businessmen make a lot of profit from the products and events that us in the masses consume. And because they make so much money, people believe that they earned it all. Entertainment industry employees and athletes certainly can work hard. But if you look at work and what people get paid for is as the sheer worth of people’s hours the question remains: what makes one person’s hour worth more than another person’s hour? Why is an actor’s or musician’s or athlete’s hour worth more than a doctor’s or a teacher’s or a firefighter’s? What makes a director’s hour worth more than any other office manager or creative project manager? I’m not saying entertainment industry employees and athletes aren’t working as hard. But the misconception from culture is that the more money you make, the harder you must be working or the more worthwhile the work you’re doing must be. And this is a misconception, it simply doesn’t have any merit. Frankly, they aren’t working harder than someone who works 40+ hours a week and also spends an average of 10 hours just commuting to and from work, outside of a pandemic. Even if you argue that celebrities and athletes should get paid decently because of the way their work takes a toll on their bodies, for one, CEOs and other 1% business people don’t apply here, and secondly, if it was about the risk to people’s bodies we’d be seeing factory workers, first responders, the military, construction workers, security guards, surgeons who perform 30+ hour surgeries or birth doctors who help with 20+ hour labors, people who work with or in areas that have predatory wild animals or toxic chemicals, people whose work leaves them exposed to the elements, etc. all making equivalent money to celebrities and athletes, and that’s not the case. We all know that’s not how it is. Right now during the pandemic our “essential workers” are all putting themselves at risk of semi or permanent damage to their bodies or death because of Corona and everyone knows they’re not getting paid enough for that risk. Celebrities and athletes should make money for their time just like any other employee, but as it stands they make a disproportionate amount of money, and this money pushes them into the top 10%, if not the top 1%. Plus, they don’t pay taxes because they’re rich enough to be exempt, so they don’t pay for the resources they use, whether that’s the roads they drive on, the water they use, the buildings or outdoor locations where they work, etc.
Nobility and the use of noble titles was banned in the US Constitution. Yet, I would argue that celebrities and politicians have become the USA’s nobility and royalty - and the ultra-rich are definitely a part of that as well. Hunger Games got this right - “pay attention to these shiny individuals, not your friends and neighbors and coworkers who don’t have the same privileges and suffer for it”. Most celebrities were born as average as you and me. But when they began making extreme amounts of money and got the fame, they were boosted in a new social class and this social class allows people within it to be treated as though they are above the average citizen. This is also exactly how systems of power take otherwise effective martyrs and twist and manipulate the story so the story either benefits the system or appears to be an isolated incident of individual heroism/bravery/success (Hunger Games got this right too, with the Victors, and Peeta). Some people *appear* to handle their rank gracefully, and others clearly have become twisted by it. But for people in this special class, all publicity is good publicity. It is commonplace for celebrities and politicians to have scandals brought to light and yet receive no real punishment for it. In fact, they make more money, because of all of the interviews they get to do trying to claim either they didn’t do anything wrong or they did and they’re so very sorry get counted as part of their job. The average person who goes to court to do the same thing is far more likely to be saddled with court costs then to get paid to defend themselves. Our cultural norms say that for most people, any public behavior reflects on you and your family and also could be seen by those who are impressionable, so you should be sure to be on your best behavior. But for those who enjoy celebrity AKA American Nobility, even though you would think they would be under even more pressure and scrutiny, they actually are given more grace and forgiveness and allowed to get away with more because there are no consequences for their actions. People like me can complain about what people do, they can have a less comfortable time on social media because of cancel culture, but on the other hand, cancel culture isn’t actually effective and it’s probably naive to think that a celebrity is actually managing their own social media account all by themselves, but unless they stop getting work which means they stop getting paid, they don’t face any real consequences for their actions. Which is the interesting thing about nobility, because in traditional understandings of the nobility, the noble class was supposed to use their money and resources to care for the areas they had been “entrusted” with, including providing protection and law enforcement/governing, providing aid after natural disasters, helping to fund public schools and public hospitals, protecting places of worship, attending to public infrastructure, etc. Sure, today’s celebrities occasionally donate to charities, especially if it can give them good media coverage, like the Ice Bucket Challenge a few years back for ALS, but come on. Jeff Bezos runs his company like it’s 1900. How many celebrities are going into their communities and helping renovate schools and hospitals and community centers, or spending more than a couple thousand on a scholarship here and there, or helping fund more grocery stores and community gardens to fight food deserts, or putting pressure on their friends in politics to put out legislation that actually benefits the people, or putting money towards protecting natural areas, or buying medical supplies and food for their communities after they’re ravished from a natural disaster, or helping to provide affordable housing for the homeless, or paying off student lunch debt to help with child hunger, or any other number of things they could use their resources for? They get the benefits of nobility - the wealth, the status, the renown, the expensive clothes and oversized homes and affordable top-quality medical care and other status symbols - without taking up any of the responsibilities of giving back to the communities that got them there in the first place, namely average citizens. If the average citizen didn’t stan people, didn’t buy in to the celebrity status, they wouldn’t have near the same amount of power that they do.
And all of this is true and will remains this way because it benefits the wealthy class and the nobility. It keeps them in power. Because people accept the justification that this work is more important or this work is worth more, they can continue making amounts of money that are unfathomable to the average person. And thus they can continue to hoard resources like dragons while other people die of starvation or from the elements or because their insulin and medicine is too expensive. And as mentioned earlier, since they are rich enough to get out of paying taxes, they don’t contribute to the infrastructure, leaving that to the people who have less they can even offer let alone what’s actually taken from them. And they benefit off of the average citizen’s work. They wouldn’t be so beautiful without their army of stylists and makeup artists and seamstresses. Their homes wouldn’t be so extravagant without their garbage workers and landscapers and construction workers and renovators. They wouldn’t find it so easy to manage their lives without their nannies and personal assistants and agents and PR teams and housekeepers and personal chefs. Do you honestly think any of these people are getting paid fairly, or even close to what they’re getting? To paraphrase the song Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog, they’re feeding on the powerless when their cups are already overfilled. And because they’re positioned as more or less the American nobility, they’re seen as better than the average citizen, so how could anyone possibly justify questioning their social standing or their privilege? This is The Way Things Are, so what does it matter? Like most major problems and inequalities in the world, this only works because people are convinced to buy into the fact that some people are just better than other people. And who has the authority to decide that? The people in power. Who are the same people as the people who benefit from and profit off of the American Nobility AKA celebrity. Average citizens never even stood a chance. This is just a situation of that iconic line that goes “I don’t know how to convince you that you should care about other people”. The outcome of this case was decided before it was even brought to trial.
And I know that nothing I say here will make a difference. The capitalist machine will keep turning and no one will think to introduce a bill that would create salary caps or redistribute wealth and no one actually involved with the industry will read this and think “wow, maybe we need to do something about the growing sociocultural and economic gap between us and the rest of society” because being rich and famous gives them the privilege to put themselves above these concerns. If this gets any notes, I’m more likely to get anon hate or upfront disagreements because I implicated their smol sons or their celebrity crush or whatever than anyone who actually thinks I might be onto something. I’m only taking the time to type this out because releasing the thoughts into the void makes me feel better.
TL;DR: Celebrities get disproportionate amounts of admiration from other citizens and money in their paycheck because their work is given more importance because the wealthy class that controls business makes ridiculous amounts of money off of the projects, events, and products they are a part of and so the unequal distribution of wealth and status elevates celebrities into the 1% and the American Nobility so they no longer have consequences for their actions or have to contribute towards their communities in any meaningful way and that is a Problem.
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tingkwok26 · 5 years
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The Hot New Solution to Student Loans Is Just Taking Money Out of Your Paycheck|EMVertex Credits
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If you have student loans in 2019, you also have a somewhat distressingly large number of different ways to pay them back. Besides the standard repayment plan, in which the government calculates a monthly bill based on what you owe, there’s a graduated plan for people who want to pay more later, which is somehow different from what the system calls paying-as-you-earn and income-contingent repayment. In other words, deciding to take on debt for what hopefully will be a worthwhile degree is just the first in a series of complicated decisions that may dictate what much of your adult financial life looks like.
Now Lamar Alexander, the Republican chairman of the Senate committee that deals with education issues, is pushing a proposal—one that stands a non-zero chance of passing—promising to condense repayment alternatives into just two clear options. But it could also let the government dip into borrowers’s paychecks, making the already-harrowing story of America’s student loan system potentially more precarious for people of limited income.
The option I believe most borrowers would choose would be a repayment plan based on a borrower’s income, which would never require the borrower to make payments of more than 10 percent of his or her discretionary income,” Alexander told an audience at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute early this month. “And it would make sure that if there was no money earned, there would be no money owed, and that would not affect negatively on the borrower’s credit. The other option would be a ten-year repayment plan with equal monthly payments, a lot like a ten-year mortgage.”
Alexander, a conservative Republican but not exactly a Trump guy, has signaledhe intends to push this change through as part of a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act before he retires at the end of next year.
Automatic payroll deduction is just one example of the student loan reforms being debated in Congress, which also include potentially expanding the tax code so employers can contribute up to $5,250 tax-free annually to workers’ balance and making the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) less convoluted. But it’s the part that’s gained the most traction in the press, not all of it negative. In fact, some experts have argued it could be a real help to the country’s $1.5 trillion student debt problem, or at least that it’s time for Americans to start thinking of debt payments in the same way they do Social Security—socked away for them whether they like it or not.
“I think this proposal is likely to become law, after some tweaks,” student-loan expert Mark Kantrowitz told CNBC.
One potential upside here is that automatic deduction might not require people re-certify their income every year (or else lose access to an income-based repayment plan). This can be an incredibly stressful process—loan servicers are supposed to remind you to do this, but in my personal experience they often do not. In fact, multiple states and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have sued servicer Navient for, among other things, allegedly confusing borrowers intentionally about repayment in general and recertification in particular so that they could bilk them for more money. (The company has denied the claims and sought, unsuccessfully, to dismiss at least some of the suits.) Meanwhile, missing paperwork or obfuscated deadlines is one of the main reasons that fewer than 1 percent of the 30,000 people who applied for public-service debt forgiveness last year actually received it. It makes sense to eliminate some of this confusion and streamline the process.
But what consumer advocates have begun to warn about is that extracting loan payments from paychecks amounts to “mandatory wage garnishment.” It may not be possible under this new scheme to account for people, say, facing unforeseen medical emergencies to keep more of their paycheck fast. In fact, the National Consumer Law Center quickly filed a policy report called The Dark Side of Payroll Withholding to Repay Student Loans not long after Alexander’s speech. In the paper, the authors argue forcing people in the gig economy or with otherwise unstable employment into a system like the one proposed could force them to choose between payments and rent, heat, or food. They also argued it would disproportionately affect people who were middle class or barely scraping by—teachers, cashiers, basically anyone not rich—to begin with.
These are legitimate concerns, though it’s worth noting that a much-worse version of this kind of garnishment already exists. If you default on your loans, the entire balance is immediately due in full, plus collection charges up to 24 percent of your balance. That also means the federal government—a.k.a. the world’s most powerful loan shark—can just take up to 15 percent of your paycheck. Not quite a baseball bat to the kneecaps, but potentially crippling nonetheless.
The debate may be entirely moot: As Inside Higher Ed noted, getting anything to pass in a hyper-partisan Congress is a challenge. Still, unlike some of the other proposals that have floated in recent years—like eliminating the exemption that makes it so people can’t file bankruptcy on student loans—this suggestion by an old-school, business-minded Republican did not immediately seem like a nonstarter on Capitol Hill. Though a similar proposal was dangled but never enacted during the Clinton years, according to the Washington Post, we live in different times. Alexander’s idea could catch on given that nearly 40 percent of borrowers were expected to default by 2023—and because it could maybe sort-of speak to anger about the loan system without appearing to let anyone off the hook.
But even if aspects of the proposal might be appealing, it would amount to a tweak of an enormous problem at the margins. This plan wouldn’t cancel or forgive anyone’s debt. It wouldn’t make (some) higher education tuition-free, as just-announced presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has promised. And it definitely would not address the macroeconomic forces that caused the generation-crushing student debt issue to begin with. In that sense, it’s a perfect policy for this distressing late capitalist moment—a reform that’s too modest to get excited about, full of potential landmines, and might even be doomed anyway.
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sweet-dree-ms-blog · 7 years
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Cheat Payday 2
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solarpunk-gnome · 7 years
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(via Why we should all have a basic income – World Economic Forum – Medium)
Consider for a moment that from this day forward, on the first day of every month, around $1,000 is deposited into your bank account — because you are a citizen. This income is independent of every other source of income and guarantees you a monthly starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life.
What do you do? Possibly of more importance, what don’t you do? How does this firm foundation of economic security and positive freedom affect your present and future decisions, from the work you choose to the relationships you maintain, to the risks you take?
The idea is called unconditional or universal basic income, or UBI. It’s like social security for all, and it’s taking root within minds around the world and across the entire political spectrum, for a multitude of converging reasons. Rising inequality, decades of stagnant wages, the transformation of lifelong careers into sub-hourly tasks, exponentially advancing technology like robots and deep neural networks increasingly capable of replacing potentially half of all human labour, world-changing events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump — all of these and more are pointing to the need to start permanently guaranteeing everyone at least some income.
A promise of equal opportunity
“Basic income” would be an amount sufficient to secure basic needs as a permanent earnings floor no one could fall beneath, and would replace many of today’s temporary benefits, which are given only in case of emergency, and/or only to those who successfully pass the applied qualification tests. UBI would be a promise of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, a new starting line set above the poverty line.
It may surprise you to learn that a partial UBI has already existed in Alaska since 1982, and that a version of basic income was experimentally tested in the United States in the 1970s. The same is true in Canada, where the town of Dauphin managed to eliminate poverty for five years. Full UBI experiments have been done more recently in places such as Namibia, Indiaand Brazil. Other countries are following suit: Finland, the Netherlands and Canada are carrying out government-funded experiments to compare against existing programmes. Organizations like Y Combinator and GiveDirectly have launched privately funded experiments in the US and East Africa respectively.
I know what you’re thinking. It’s the same thing most people think when they’re new to the idea. Giving money to everyone for doing nothing? That sounds both incredibly expensive and a great way to encourage people to do nothing. Well, it may sound counter-intuitive, but the exact opposite is true on both accounts. What’s incredibly expensive is not having basic income, and what really motivates people to work is, on one hand, not taking money away from them for working, and on the other hand, not actually about money at all.
Basic income in numbers
What tends to go unrealized about the idea of basic income, and this is true even of many economists — but not all — is that it represents a net transfer. In the same way it does not cost $20 to give someone $20 in exchange for $10, it does not cost $3 trillion to give every adult citizen $12,000 and every child $4,000, when every household will be paying varying amounts of taxes in exchange for their UBI. Instead it will cost around 30% of that, or about $900 billion, and that’s before the full or partial consolidation of other programmes and tax credits immediately made redundant by the new transfer. In other words, for someone whose taxes go up $4,000 to pay for $12,000 in UBI, the cost to give that person UBI is $8,000, not $12,000, and it’s coming from someone else whose taxes went up $20,000 to pay for their own $12,000. However, even that’s not entirely accurate, because the consolidation of the safety net and tax code UBI allows could drive the total price even lower.
Now, this idea of replacing existing programmes can scare some just as it appeals to others, but the choice is not all or nothing: partial consolidation is possible. As an example of partial consolidation, because most seniors already effectively have a basic income through social security, they could either choose between the two, or a percentage of their social security could be converted into basic income. Either way, no senior would earn a penny less than now in total, and yet the UBI price tag could be reduced by about $220 billion. Meanwhile, just a few examples of existing revenue that could and arguably should be fully consolidated into UBI would likely be food and nutrition assistance ($108 billion), wage subsidies ($72 billion), child tax credits ($56 billion), temporary assistance for needy families ($17 billion), and the home mortgage interest deduction (which mostly benefits the wealthy anyway, at a cost of at least $70 billion per year). That’s $543 billion spent on UBI instead of all the above, which represents only a fraction of the full list, none of which need be healthcare or education.
So what’s the true cost?
The true net cost of UBI in the US is therefore closer to an additional tax revenue requirement of a few hundred billion dollars — or less — depending on the many design choices made, and there exists a variety of ideas out there for crossing such a funding gap in a way that many people might prefer, that would also treat citizens like the shareholders they are (virtually all basic research is taxpayer funded), and that could even reduce taxes on labour by focusing more on capital, consumption, and externalities instead of wages and salaries. Additionally, we could eliminate the $540 billion in tax expenditures currently being provided disproportionately to the wealthiest, and also some of the $850 billion spent on defence.
Universal basic income is thus entirely affordable and essentially Milton Friedman’s negative income tax in net outcome (and he himself knew this), where those earning below a certain point are given additional income, and those earning above a certain point are taxed additional income. UBI does not exist outside the tax system unless it’s provided through pure monetary expansion or extra-governmental means. In other words, yes, Bill Gates will get $12,000 too but as one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires he will pay far more than $12,000 in new taxes to pay for it. That however is not similarly true for the bottom 80% of all US households, who will pay the same or less in total taxes.
To some, this may sound wasteful. Why give someone money they don’t need, and then tax their other income? Think of it this way: is it wasteful to put seat belts in every car instead of only in the cars of those who have gotten into accidents thus demonstrating their need for seat belts? Good drivers never get into accidents, right? So it might seem wasteful. But it’s not because we recognize the absurd costs of determining who would and wouldn’t need seat belts, and the immeasurable costs of being wrong. We also recognize that accidents don’t only happen to “bad” drivers. They can happen to anyone, at any time, purely due to random chance. As a result, seat belts for everyone.
The truth is that the costs of people having insufficient incomes are many and collectively massive. It burdens the healthcare system. It burdens the criminal justice system. It burdens the education system. It burdens would-be entrepreneurs, it burdens both productivity and consumer buying power and therefore entire economies. The total cost of all of these burdens well exceeds $1 trillion annually, and so the few hundred billion net additional cost of UBI pays for itself many times over. That’s the big-picture maths.
The real effects on motivation
But what about people then choosing not to work? Isn’t that a huge burden too? Well that’s where things get really interesting. For one, conditional welfare assistance creates a disincentive to work through removal of benefits in response to paid work. If accepting any amount of paid work will leave someone on welfare barely better off, or even worse off, what’s the point? With basic income, all income from paid work (after taxes) is earned as additional income so that everyone is always better off in terms of total income through any amount of employment — whether full time, part time or gig. Thus basic income does not introduce a disincentive to work. It removes the existing disincentive to work that conditional welfare creates.
Fascinatingly, improved incentives are where basic income really shines. Studies of motivation reveal that rewarding activities with money is a good motivator for mechanistic work but a poor motivator for creative work. Combine that with the fact that creative work is to be what’s left after most mechanistic work is handed off to machines, and we’re looking at a future where increasingly the work that’s left for humans is not best motivated extrinsically with money, but intrinsically out of the pursuit of more important goals. It’s the difference between doing meaningless work for money, and using money to do meaningful work.
Basic income thus enables the future of work, and even recognizes all the unpaid intrinsically motivated work currently going on that could be amplified, for example in the form of the $700 billion in unpaid workperformed by informal caregivers in the US every year, and all the work in the free/open source software movement (FOSSM) that’s absolutely integral to the internet.
There is also another way basic income could affect work incentives that is rarely mentioned and somewhat more theoretical. UBI has the potential to better match workers to jobs, dramatically increase engagement, and even transform jobs themselves through the power UBI provides to refuse them.
A truly free market for labour
How many people are unhappy with their jobs? According to Gallup, worldwide, only 13% of those with jobs feel engaged with them. In the US, 70% of workers are not engaged or actively disengaged, the cost of which is a productivity loss of around $500 billion per year. Poor engagement is even associated with a disinclination to donate money, volunteer or help others. It measurably erodes social cohesion.
At the same time, there are those among the unemployed who would like to be employed, but the jobs are taken by those who don’t really want to be there. This is an inevitable result of requiring jobs in order to live. With no real choice, people do work they don’t wish to do in exchange for money that may be insufficient — but that’s still better than nothing — and then cling to that paid work despite being the “working poor” and/or disengaged. It’s a mess.
Basic income — in 100 people
Take an economy without UBI. We’ll call it Nation A. For every 100 working-age adults there are 80 jobs. Half the work force is not engaged by their jobs, and half again as many are unemployed with half of them really wanting to be employed, but, as in a game of musical chairs, they’re left without a chair.
Basic income fundamentally alters this reality. By unconditionally providing income outside of employment, people can refuse to do the jobs that aren’t engaging them. This in turn opens up those jobs to the unemployed who would be engaged by them. It also creates the bargaining power for everyone to negotiate better terms. How many jobs would become more attractive if they paid more money or required fewer hours? How would this reorganizing of the labour supply affect productivity if the percentage of disengaged workers plummeted? How much more prosperity would that create?
Consider now an economy with basic income. Let’s call it Nation B. For every 100 working age adults there are still 80 jobs, at least to begin with. The disengaged workforce says “no thanks” to the labour market as is, enabling all 50 people who want to work to do the jobs they want. To attract those who demand more compensation or shorter work weeks, some employers raise their wages. Others reduce the required hours. The result is a transformed labour market of more engaged, more employed, better paid, more productive workers. Fewer people are excluded, and there’s perhaps more scope for all workers to become self-employed entrepreneurs.
Simply put, a basic income improves the market for labour by making it optional. The transformation from a coercive market to a free market means that employers must attract employees with better pay and more flexible hours. It also means a more productive work force that potentially obviates the need for market-distorting minimum wage laws. Friction might even be reduced, so that people can move more easily from job to job, or from job to education/retraining to job, or even from job to entrepreneur, all thanks to more individual liquidity and the elimination of counter-productive bureaucracy and conditions.
Perhaps best of all, the automation of low-demand jobs becomes further incentivized through the rising of wages. The work that people refuse to do for less than a machine would cost to do it becomes a job for machines. And thanks to those replaced workers having a basic income, they aren’t just left standing in the cold in the job market’s ongoing game of musical chairs. They are instead better enabled to find new work, paid or unpaid, full-time or part-time, that works best for them.
Like a game of musical chairs — with robots
The tip of a big iceberg
The idea of basic income is deceivingly simple sounding, but in reality it’s like an iceberg with far more to be revealed as you dive deeper. Its big picture price tag in the form of investing in human capital for far greater returns, and its effects on what truly motivates us are but glimpses of these depths. There are many more. Some are already known, like the positive effects on social cohesion and physical and mental health as seen in the 42% drop in crime in Namibia and the 8.5% reduction in hospitalizations in Dauphin, Manitoba. Debts tend to fall. Entrepreneurship tends to grow. Other effects have yet to be discovered by further experiments. But the growing body of evidence behind cash transfers in general point to basic income as something far more transformative to the future of work than even its long history of consideration has imagined.
It’s like a game of Monopoly where the winning teams have rewritten the rules so players no longer collect money for passing Go. The rule change functions to exclude people from markets. Basic income corrects this. But it’s more than just a tool for improving markets by making them more inclusive; there’s something more fundamental going on.
Humans need security to thrive, and basic income is a secure economic base — the new foundation on which to transform the precarious present, and build a more solid future. That’s not to say it’s a silver bullet. It’s that our problems are not impossible to solve. Poverty is not a supernatural foe, nor is extreme inequality or the threat of mass income loss due to automation. They are all just choices. And at any point, we can choose to make new ones.
Based on the evidence we already have and will likely continue to build, I firmly believe one of those choices should be unconditional basic income as a new equal starting point for all.
Originally published at weforum.org.
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higgzbosen · 6 years
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The biggest tax cuts, not reform as they like to claim, but tax cuts that no one argues disproportionately favor those elites who make millions already and corporations. Millionaires like most of the Republicans in office deciding who gets these "gifts" or maybe we should call these now entitlements, because while some of us little people, the forgotten ones that his orangeness loves to brag that this affront to equality is, while we may see more money in our pockets this year or the next few, don't forget, and I know that most of you will when it comes time to remember these things, but for those forgotten people everything is temporary. All of the provisions that would benifit anyone who is not swimming in that swamp that still remains to be drained, everything for us has a sunset. Meaning temporary. Only a few years does this middle class miracle befall the vast majority of Americans, while those enormous cuts for the corporations and the class that run and profit from them are permanent.
This is exactly the same behavior that the republicans all ways run against, governments out of control spending, yet these guys continually prove again and again that it's all a lie. They are paying back their contributors and themselves with this bill and don't kid yourself, any benifit you get from this was a calculated effort to just keep you on the hook, to prove to us that they kept their promise and care, but again only so much.
It shouldn't be hard to reason that these temporary benifits were a byproduct of the outrage that has been growing over this robbing of the government till to give to the richest among us. It's not for you and never was or this would have been like any other process of law making and hearings would have been had, debates would have ensued over this one sided tragedy. But the Republican party has proven itself to be a wicked and vile corruption of the democratic process and this should be their final call for destruction.
They will parade around touting that this is the greatest thing for America. Their smiling faces knowing that they have served their masters well, but not the people. The party is corrupted and will try to sell this as good for everyone when common sense will tell you otherwise, but they have learned that they can manipulate and spin anything enough to keep the loyal base voting for them.
These new entitlements for the corporate elites that grace our country with their God given wealth, will now become even richer but at the cost to the rest of us. These people, whose wealth give them the ability to manipulate the tax codes with another vile entity the lawyer, so that they most likely don't even pay the amount they actually owed before this and you can bet they will be using the same utilities to pay even less than their share now as this rushed bill will most certainly have many more loop hole opportunities to take advantage of and benifit from, because that's what people do when greed takes hold and drives their very existence.
The republican party has made it clear who they represent and it's not you rural folks. No its the same folks who are now most certainly going to thrive in growing swamp that will never be drained by 45. The party is the party of theives, liars, profiteers, hypoctites and pedophiles. While they claim to be concerned about you, look closely at this bill and see who their masters are. Now to pay for these paltry and TEMPORARY gains, we will get to see them spend what will hopefully be their last year as the controlling majority trying to cut spending on welfare and other favorite punching bags that decry an out of control government. The money has to come from some where, because the permanent cuts, for the richest among us, are permanent. The government is loosing money on this and to make up for that they will go after things that their dogmatic approach proves out to be for the takers of our society. You know no one who didn't earn their millions the hard way, by inheritance.
They have won the class battle today because they cheated. They will lie to you in the coming months about how those vile democrats worked against this great payoff of the populace. That they really wanted to keep that sliver of the pie from you. They won't explain that their absence from the process was the plan ND it worked out well in the end. The republican party, the traitors of the people never tried to work with anyone on this, it was all theirs and they should own this, but they play the long game, in the coming decades as the sunset looms on the pittance of the bill the little people get, they will turn this into another issue against the democratic process by spinning the issue against the democrates when they fail to extend or make them permanent, which just keeps us divided again, being played by the elite of this country for the very scraps they have so benevolently given us this year.
The party is ran by the very elite that 45 ran against and when he gained office, built his cabinet with. Detestable characters that he vilified to gain the votes of middle America, he gave the keys too. Yet no one seemed to care. The party is corrupted by the constant flow of money from corporations and wealthy people whose only goal is to dominate this nation so they can control not only your morality but your fiscal situations as well. They prop up sequel deviants and tell you that no after what, it's better than a Democrate. Really? This moral equivalency held water? That really caring group, the evangelicals went with it. They for some reason love to support the biggest liar of them all because he fights for Christmas? You loose all of your holy high ground when you support not only a pedophile, but a man who bragged about violation of women, but it's OK right, because he fears god? Your fools because his only God is greed and his ascendancy to power has finally laid the parties true allegiances bare.
This is the new symbol of the Republican party. Their influence is now becoming more dangerous as they begin to try and use their propaganda wing, fox news to undermine the credibility of the very government that they now are in control of. How can it be so disastrously out of control and they be at the wheel, yet not responsible for it? They blame others for their failures and the propaganda wing repeatedly beats it's viewers into submission by playing on the fears of the common man. They blow up the differences between us making them out to be an assault on their beliefs when it's simply not the case. They blame but never try to offer anything to fix, only to maintain the status quo, them being in charge.
This needs to end and it should start with the destruction of the Republican party. They represent no american civilian who works for a living, no poor, no middle-class, only the corporate elites. They want a plutocracry, always have and have always worked towards that goal, because they know better than the rest of us, they know that giving corporations more money back will only do one thing, continue to enrich their masters with more money and power.
Then party of Reagan, once the great defender against communism, is now led by an orange entity that is most likely compromised by that very enemy, yet they continue to try to prevent the facts from coming out about the last election. Delaying or misdirection of efforts to undermine what is a truly terrifying prospect. One that needs to be fully investigated because it's a true danger to our nation, yet the propaganda wing only aims to muddy the waters at every reveal of these horrible activities so far, blaming the blatant lies told by this administration on things like inexperience? Remember this is the same party that impeached a president for lying about oral sex. So lying about an extra marital affair is a bigger constitutional crisis than the possibility that the current placeholder president is a Russian agent of some kind? You can't make this kind of hypocrisy up any more. This party knows no bounds when it comes to keeping power.
That's why it has to be destoyed. Any republican with a sense of decency or humanity must know this. They have seen it coming but with the emergence and hostile take over of the party by the orange menace, it's now more than ever time for this absurdity to end. We are all Americans, not party members. If any party tells you different, they should be suspect from the start, but when they begin to use it as a justification for their actions, it's time put them down like the sick animal they have become.
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topicprinter · 4 years
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Ecommerce, COVID, and How Americans SpendEverybody is at home: no more parties, no more business drinks, no more date nights on the town, or concerts, or even hikes, it seems (I live in LA and they closed the parks and trails in the area). Folks staying at home means a massive surge in screen usage, and a corresponding surge in social media usage — anything from Reddit to Facebook. What does this mean for ecommerce?That depends on your target market, and the relevant distinction is the nature of their work — not their age or average income.Based on first order impact on discretionary spending alone, we should expect a more than 1/3 increase in online spending from the average american consumer under 40 who is stuck at home and didn’t have any cut to income (specifically a ~38% increase). However, for anyone who has suffered a reduction in their income, we can expect that reduction in income to result in a much larger reduction in discretionary spending (specifically a 40% reduction would cause an ~87% reduction using the example below).While a glut in screen usage means overall cheaper impressions for e-commerce sites, that will only translate to profitability depending on conversions. Whether you get those conversions will depend on to whom you are advertising, and the meaningful distinction here is the nature of their work, not their age, income bracket, etc. Folks in non-quarantine-sensitive industries, whose income stays the same, will have more budget than before to spend on online purchases. Folks who take a pay cut reduce discretionary purchases disproportionately to their income reduction.Eyeballs Are On Sale, and Ecommerce Brands Are Feeling The DifferencePaid social media advertising, the bread and butter (or heroine) of direct to consumer ecommerce is the closest thing we have ever had in history to a liquid central exchange between human attention and USD. This gives us reasonably efficient (if not always transparent) pricing of how much it costs to put your pixels in front of another person’s eyeballs.Rather than going too Econ 101 and putting a supply vs demand curve here, let’s just acknowledge that this is a huge influx of supply for eyeballs-on-screens, which means it’s cheaper to buy space in front of eyeballs (cheaper CPMs: cost per impression). And, at least some buyers of ads have stopped paying for paid social (e.g. someone promoting any kind of in-person event).E-commerce brands are feeling the difference, and naturally have to taken to twitter to make sure everyone knows about it. I'd include a screenshot of tweets form ecommerce bros, but I can't on this sub.This makes sense at the top level: if a consumer is buying anything, they’re buying it online. And if they’re looking at anything besides their wall, or cat, or roommate, it’s probably a screen.But, depending on the cohort to which you advertise, you could be seeing falling conversions, or, at the very least, failing to optimize your ad spend.Obviously, folks who haven’t gotten pay cuts (or lost their jobs) are more likely to make a purchase, but going through the actual cases shows that the difference may be even more dramatic than you might originally think. This is relevant because it shows that it’s worth doing the work to figure out and optimize to which cohort your ads are served, whether you’re doing so to improve already good conversion rates or to fix bad conversion rates.Meet Hannah and Rachel (The Average American Consumer Under 40)Meet Hannah and Rachel. Hannah and Rachel both match the exact average income and spending patterns of American adult consumers born 1981 or later (basically thirty nine or below — see analytics note [1]). The difference between them is that Hannah works in an industry largely unaffected by having to do remote work: let’s say she works at Tech Startup X as a customer experience specialist (or whatever that startup calls the human you finally fight your way to after rejecting multiple customer service answers from robots), and Rachel has a job that is indirectly affected by the quarantine (but not completely shut down) — perhaps at a post production company that edits ads for agencies: she’ll keep her job, but get a pay cut.Pre-quarantine both of them earn $58,628 (post-tax) per year. About 90% of this is spent and accounted for, meaning $52,874 of annual expenditures. A little over half that annual spending is “fixed,” and let’s call the rest “discretionary” (see analytics note [2]). I'd put a pretty chart in here, but this sub's rules don't let me, so here's an ugly table.Fixed vs Discretionary Spending:Annual ExpendituresDollar Amount% of Total SpendAnnual Expenditure Total$52,874100%Fixed$28,58456%Discretionary$24,29046%Discretionary Spending Breakdown:Fixed Expenditure CategoryDollar Amount% of Fixed SpendFixed Total$24,290100%Housing and Utilities$18,32964%Groceries$3,72413%Healthcare$2,83110%Fixed Vehicle Expenses$2,1898%Education$1,3085%Other Insurance$2031%(All spending data from Consumer Expenditure Survey 2018, Bureau of Labor Statistics)Which leaves about $24,290 of discretionary spending per year after fixed costs are covered. Let’s see what happens to that discretionary spending (which is what ecommerce businesses are vying for) during a quarantine.All Else Equal, Hannah is Probably Spending ~38% More on Online ShoppingAlthough Hannah’s income has remained the same, the breakdown of her discretionary spending has changed. She is no longer using discretionary spending for restaurants, bars, concerts, gas, etc., which frees up a lot of cash. Using consumer spending data, we can estimate that she just freed up about 28% of her discretionary budget by being stuck at home (see analytics note [3]).Hanna's Pre-Quarantine Discretionary Budget:Discretionary Budget CategoryDollar Amount% of Discretionary SpendDiscretionary Budget Total$24,290100%Things she can do at home$17,59972%Things she can NOT do at home$6,69128%Things She Can NOT Do At Home Breakdown:Can NOT Do at Home CategoryDollar Amount% of Can NOT do at Home SpendCan NOT do at Home Total$6,691100%Eating Out$3,33850%Gas, Fuel, Oil$2,05331%Transportation$66510%External Entertainment$6359%(All spending data from Consumer Expenditure Survey 2018, Bureau of Labor Statistics)Unless Hannah starts saving more money, this would mean that she has $6,691 of free cash in her annual discretionary budget (about an extra $558/month) for “spending time” at home (see analytics note [4]). Allocating that extra budget to every category of at home expenditures (like, say, online shopping) proportionally would imply a 38% increase in each category (see analytics note [5])This is the impact from first order forced budget changes alone: there is, of course, an additional effect of buying the same things but online instead of in person, which would make the increase even greater in the online shopping category. There are also additional factors like the increase in screen usage being more focused on computers than phones (which usually means better conversions), which would provide an additional bump. We could debate whether the reallocation of that capital is proportional across all at home spending categories, but the higher level point is clear (anecdotally, based on instagram, I don’t have any trouble believing many folks have increased their spending on alcoholic beverages, for example, by almost 40%) .This would imply that if you are advertising to Hannah, or can make sure you start advertising to Hannah, you should not only expect lower CPMs, but way better conversions for the duration of quarantine.All Else Equal, a ~40% Pay Cut for Rachel is an ~87% Decrease in Discretionary SpendingWhat about Rachel the film editor? No gathering of people means no new filming means no new ads for her post production house to edit: half of her coworkers got fired as the company tried to reduce costs and the rest (Rachel included) received a forty percent pay cut — but she’s one of the lucky ones for still having a job at all (see analytics note [6]).The frustrating thing about fixed expenses is that they don’t go away when your income falls, which means that the proportional impact on discretionary spending has a multiplier because that’s where the entire income hit goes. In this case that is going to be ~2x the reduction, with the numbers we’re using as an example specifically creating an 87% reduction in discretionary spending as a result of a 40% pay-cut. This is because your fixed costs now account for 90% of your income.Rachel's Fixed vs Discretionary Spending Post Pay-Cut:Annual ExpendituresDollar Amount% of Total SpendAnnual Expenditure Total$31,724.40100%Fixed$28,584 (same)90%Discretionary$3,140.4010%(All spending data from Consumer Expenditure Survey 2018, Bureau of Labor Statistics)Remember, the numbers above are annual: Rachel has $261.70 a month to spend now.And that’s not accounting for things like now having to buy more groceries, actually, as you are never eating out and no longer having lunch provided by work. If Rachel has a bill coming through for an unusual expense that she was expecting this month’s salary to cover, it isn’t getting paid (you could slightly shrink this impact by ascribing all of the unaccounted for income to discretionary spending, but I’m not sure it makes sense to do so: see analytics note [4], again)This roughly squares with the experience of a friend of mine who is in nearly exactly this boat, working in editing, 40% pay cut, etc. After cancelling all their subscriptions they actually ended up with only $200/month after fixed costs not including groceries.Suffice to say, no matter how low CPMs are, you are not going to convert Rachel to a purchaser right now. But, also, why are we even talking about ecommerce at this point?Rachel Is Not OK, and America Needs RachelGiven a recent FT poll indicating that 73% of Americans have had their family’s income reduced by COVID, with 24% saying it had been hit “very significantly” Rachel’s situation is more than an abstract subset of American consumers having a rough time: it’s a portrait that hopefully captures and brings to life the havoc this pandemic has wreaked on the financial stability of American households.And, for many of those households, it isn’t a 40% pay cut — it’s 100%. It’s immediate insolvency, and bills they cannot pay this month. And, if the situation persists, the number of those financially shipwrecked by COVID will grow, as missed bills mean missed income for someone else, and falling income affects the ability to pay debts, which in turn affects asset prices etc. The amount of government stimulus, both directed at businesses and at individuals, required to prevent a downward economic spiral in this environment is going to be mind-boggling — and it’s not a forgone conclusion that we will be able to pull it off.And to those who really just came here to increase ROAS; I do hope this was useful to you. But I also hope you’re a little mindful about how and where you celebrate your success — it may be in poor taste to be flaunting your stats on social media while millions of individuals and families are suffering through the loss of some (or all) of their income, with no clear end in sight.------------------------------------------------------If this interests you, and you're curious about me, you can see what I do at r/MeritStore------------------------------------------------------Analytical Notes:[1] The reason I’m choosing this age-based cohort is that the same dynamic here will exist across multiple categorizations — age group, income level, etc. The meaningful difference here is in type of work (specifically whether it is affected by quarantine) and there isn’t a clean way to cut that in consumer report data. They have breakdowns by industry but those don’t map cleanly on to “can or can’t do during pandemic”. Using this cohort I get a broad swath of the population, and a small enough income and savings rate that it highlights the impact (both the positive impact on Hannah and the negative impact on Rachel). The same impact exists at higher income levels, it’s just eased by more spare cash at the end of the day etc. In the end, this decision is in service of the point of the analysis in this case — to be illustrative, not comprehensive. I’m writing a reddit post trying to explain a dynamic, so this suffices as a clear demonstration of that dynamic. If I were still working at a fancy hedgefund and were trying to trace the economic impact of this to make specific estimates that would result in conclusions re: trades, I would go through the work of trying to parse which industries’ incomes were affected and by how much, what exactly those specific consumers spent money on, etc. Spending the time doing that wouldn’t really add to my point here, but if you really, really want to see how this looks from another cut ask me and maybe I’ll just pull it up — or go do it yourself, the data is public.[2] Our “fixed” is just grouping together housing and utilities, fixed vehicle costs (e.g. leases, maintenance, insurance), healthcare, other insurance (like life insurance), education, and groceries (food purchased for inside the home). This isn’t precise — there are likely fixed payments that are missing, e.g. phone plans, etc. Likely a larger portion than what we ascribe to “fixed” expenditures are fixes. Since that would only increase both of the effects we’re highlighting here (the multiplier of pay reduction to reduced spending and the significance of out of house spending vs total discretionary spending), I’m not too fussed about it.[3] This is probably not all of the out of house expenditures, but it’s the easiest ones to identify (vacations, for example, are completely included) — I shortened the label names, so the included categories are: entertainment fees and admissions, public and other transportation, gasoline, fuels, and motor oil, and fuels away from home. The motor oil seemed odd because I would have thought that it could be included in aforementioned vehicle maintenance category, but they’re marked separately in the Consumer Expenditure Report.[4] When I say “all else equal” this includes the spending 90% of income part. I could do the analysis where I reallocate this “saved” amount as spending to see the difference — it would slightly mitigate the impact but obviously not change the direction or higher level point. Part of the reason I didn’t do this is that I don’t really know if all of that is “saved,” it’s just not accounted for as spending in the consumer spending report. There are a few possible wiggles in this whole picture (for example, when you stop eating out your “fixed” grocery expenditure actually has to go up, or maybe you need to upgrade the quality of your internet if your working from home, etc.), which I would try to account for if I were making a comprehensive analysis of consumer spending in order to trace how much and where changes in spending were likely to affect which sectors, in order to figure out impacts on equity prices or corporate debt, but I’m just making a point here so I’m trying to keep the analysis high level and simple. If you’re that curious it could let me know and I can tell you how big of an impact it would be.[5] It pains me to think this might be necessary to spell out, but the reason that a 28% reduction, when distributed proportionally back to the parts, creates a 38% increase is that you’re using a smaller base. I take 28 from 100, it’s a 28% (28 / 100) reduction. I then add 28 to 72, which is a 38% (28 / 72) increase. You are adding back onto a smaller base, so the % increase in that smaller base (and, if proportionally added, to each part of that smaller base) is larger than the original % removed from the larger base.[6] No, I didn’t bother accounting for the change in tax rate. Like I said, it’s an illustrative analysis.
0 notes
shirlleycoyle · 4 years
Text
A Study Tried to Use Genetics to Explain Why People Are Poor
It’s tempting to see genes everywhere, lurking in every shadow. For geneticists trying to understand a disease, or Bret Stephens writing an unprompted article about "Jewish genius," genes seem powerful and mysterious, as if they could potentially contain the answer to any of life's questions.
Genetics’ allure can draw people away from more obvious explanations for problems. Here’s a hypothetical. Imagine a poor neighborhood on the side of a highway. If you notice that people living in poor neighborhoods next to highways get asthma more often than rich people across town, you could study their genomes and find some genes common in poor asthmatics. Some of those might even be for genes expressed in the throat and lungs, and then suddenly it seems like poor people are genetically predisposed to having asthma, all while ignoring the much simpler explanation that poor people are breathing in car exhaust while rich people aren’t.
Viewing genes as a determining factor while ignoring larger systemic and societal issues is misleading. For example, scientists recently went looking for a link between individual variations in people’s genomes and their income. Their results, which found that they could predict an individual’s income, in very small part, by looking at individual variations in their genomes, were published in Nature Communications in December.
Using data from about 300,000 white British people, W. David Hill at the University of Edinburgh and colleagues compared the genomes of people grouped in five income brackets. The lowest bracket was made up of those making less than 18,000 pounds per year, the next those making between 18,000 and 30,000, up to the fifth bracket, which contained those making more than 100,000 pounds per year. The data comes from the UK Biobank, a repository of anonymous personal data from about half a million British people for use by health researchers to study essentially whatever they want. The Biobank collects data on a variety of personal characteristics, from things like height and weight to herpes status and sodium in urine. Individual’s genomes are also collected.
Hill’s group highlighted specific locations in the genome that were more or less common within each income bracket—a technique called a genome-wide association study (GWAS). Many of the locations they found were in genes expressed in the brain and were correlated with performing well on intelligence tests.
From this analysis the researchers generated a “polygenic risk score” (PGS), a number that essentially adds up all the genetic variants associated with a trait, which in this case was income. The higher the PGS, the idea goes, the stronger the predictive power. In a second data set of about 30 thousand people, they looked for the same genes that were associated with income in the first set. Though they noted up front that differences in income have environmental and cultural explanations, with this analysis, they were able to account for about 2 percent of the difference in people’s income just using their genes.
What does that mean? Here’s an example: if I make $50,000/year and my friend Mark makes $100,000/year, $1,000 of the difference in our incomes could, in this scenario, be chalked up to the different genes we have. Maybe Mark has genes which give him faster-firing neurons, which make him smarter, which increases his income. The other $49,000 of the difference would come from other things like the environment, or class, or luck, according to the scientists.
The stated goal of the paper was to understand the links between socioeconomic status and health. If genetics play a role in income, the idea is that that can go some way towards lowering health disparities. Without much further explanation on how it will help, the authors say, “An understanding of the causes underlying the association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health is likely to be helpful to minimize social disparities in health and well-being.”
The paper’s authors did not respond to inquiries, though they included an FAQ section in the paper explaining that "our results do not imply that an individual is in some way predestined to end up earning a certain amount of money.” A Nature Communications spokesperson directed me to the FAQ and declined to comment further.
If your gut reaction to this research is that there’s no plausible way for genetics to meaningfully impact income, or for those meaningless differences to impact health disparities, you would be right. Research like this offers a genetic map to nowhere. It argues for nothing and proves nothing, since it offers no real-world explanation for the problems it’s supposed to study.
People will see what they want to see in such a study. Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, a book stating, among other things, that intelligence largely determines socioeconomic status and that differences in this area explain different statuses between black and white people. Here’s him tweeting about it. Here’s Claire Lehmann, the editor of the right wing apologia magazine Quillette, tweeting some eyes emojis at it. These people use these kinds of studies to reinforce the idea that class differences are at least partly innate, and so the rich and powerful inherently deserve to be rich and powerful because of something within them.
The methods used in the paper are standard-operating-procedure. “It’s a boilerplate [study]. Methodologically, it’s all standard stuff,” said David Baranger, a neurogeneticist at the University of Pittsburgh.
But, there’s a catch. “Almost anything that you can measure these days with a really huge sample, which is what we're dealing with here, there's always going to be an effect,” Baranger said. “It’s always up to the field to decide, ‘is this effect large enough to be something that we care about?’”
With a sample size as big as the UK Biobank you could pick any characteristic you wanted, like, say, enjoying an evening cup of tea. Then, comparing thousands of tea-drinkers to non-tea-drinkers, you might find that there are genetic variations more common in tea-drinkers. But that’s as far as the genetic analysis could take you. Whether tea-drinking is actually driven by genes, and whether that makes any sense, would simply have to be decided by humans.
It’s worth noting that the main statistical crux used here, the PGS, was shown in another work to overblow effects like these by a factor of 10, in some cases. That’s to say that the difference between people when measuring a trait like income can be easily overstated when relying on a PGS.
One of the authors of that study, Arbel Harpak, a geneticist at Columbia University, said via email: “We…devised a test for the presence and substantial effect of [confounding effects] on polygenic scores, and household income lit up as…clearly affected by culturally/environmentally-mediated factors.”
Harpak and colleagues’ study compared two different types of GWASs: one made up of random people, and another that’s made up of family members. If differences in traits, like income, come from genetic sources, the tests will have the same outcome. If a trait is confounded by environmental and cultural factors, the two tests will have different results, which is exactly what Harpak saw. Things like years of smoking, years of schooling, and, yes, household income were heavily affected by the environment. "We really have very little idea on how reflective [UK Biobank] associations are of direct genetic effects,” Harpak said.
The UK Biobank also isn’t a cross-section of humanity since it’s disproportionately made up of white people (the UK itself is overwhelmingly white). People in the Biobank also tend to be wealthier and healthier than non-participants (a common bias in epidemiological data called the “volunteer effect”). That homogeneity can stifle its predictive power. For instance, a genetics study derived from Biobank data to predict risk of schizophrenia was more accurate when used for white Europeans than with anyone else.
The study is emblematic of genetics as a field not seriously reckoning with its potential for misuse by 21st century pseudoscience. Plunking down a paper on how genetics affects income without making any effort to reflect on how exactly this kind of work has been used to justify barbaric practices (like the 20th century eugenicist drive to sterilize anyone deemed an “imbecile”) is irresponsible at best. At worst it indicates a belief in genetic essentialism, the idea that characteristics like intelligence and ability are defined by exclusively by genes.
Substantial differences in health deriving from socioeconomic status are a structural problem and can only be meaningfully addressed through structural changes. There is no huge societal problem that can be solved with a genetics study like this, and any attempts to do will only be fuel for those who think that social inequalities are natural and unchangeable.
Computational genetics is so new and so powerful that it’s easy to look at everything through its lens. Here’s a GWAS for being hot. Here’s a GWAS for being able to dance. Here’s a bot that pumps out GWASs for anything you can think of, like “poultry intake,” or whether you felt loved as a child. Here's a GWAS for same-sex sexual behavior.
If you want to address poor people getting sick and dying while the wealthy aim towards living forever, increase access to health care, and improve working and living conditions. Ignore the 2 percent effect and focus on taxing the top 1 percent of people who own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. That will actually help.
A Study Tried to Use Genetics to Explain Why People Are Poor syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/
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cryptoveins · 5 years
Text
The Push to Kill Cash – Australia’s Proposed Ban Shows It’s Not Conspiracy Theory
  The supposed coordination of governments and tech companies to create a one-world, cashless society is often viewed as little more than fodder for silly Youtube conspiracy videos. After all, cash is still king in daily life, even in extremely high-tech, innovative societies like Japan. Upon closer examination, though, current realities like Australia’s proposed cash transaction ban for 2020, the continuing removal of higher denomination bills from several world economies, and the creation of centralized, state cryptocurrencies by governments worldwide cannot be ignored. These trends signal a global push to kill paper money in the name of safety, security, and financial inclusion.
You Can Pay, But It Better Be Our Way
Australia’s “Black Economy Taskforce” wants to put people accepting over 10,000 AUD (~$6,750) in cash in the slammer for up to two years, or fine them up to 25,000 (~$16,890), in an ostensible bid to fight black market economies. The Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019 states:
Transactions equal to, or in excess of this amount would need to be made using the electronic payment system or by cheque. The Black Economy Taskforce recommended this action to tackle tax evasion and other criminal activities.
Long lines of people wait to exchange their obsolete rupee notes in India.
Note the similarity here with talking points of other governments. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, when announcing the devastating surprise removal of 86% of the country’s circulating paper cash in 2016, proclaimed:
Black money and corruption are the biggest obstacles in eradicating poverty.
Not surprisingly, Modi’s shock move put the dominantly cash-based society in a panic, forcing people to take their now worthless 1,000 and 500 rupee notes to banks within 50 days of the announcement, to exchange them for smaller denominations. Now The Royal Bank of India is moving to ban all cryptocurrencies but one, the state-approved, digital rupee.
500-dollar federal reserve notes were officially discontinued in 1969.
The removal of large cash bills is a worldwide, ongoing reality, with the European Central Bank (ECB) stopping production of the 500 euro note earlier this year. The note, dubbed by the media as “the Bin Laden,” was said to be used disproportionately in financing terrorism. The U.S. used to have banknotes worth $500 and higher as well, some which were known as gold certificates, entitling the bearer to physical gold upon redemption. As fractional reserve banking took over, however, and national debt increased, these systems were progressively abandoned. The trend continues today in the form of Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP), and the resultant push for digitization of money.
Stop Holding Cash and Take Our Debt
“If everyone is holding cash, negative interest rates become useless.” These are the words of former People’s Bank of China (PBOC) governor Zhou Xiaochuan after the Chinese government had just completed a trial run of their new national cryptocurrency back in 2017. Now the country’s sovereign digital currency is “almost ready.” Zhou has also officially stated:
At the current stage, the central bank’s major goal of issuing digital currency is to replace the physical cash.
Earlier in the same interview, he maintained that “The cost for cash transaction will gradually increase in the later stage. For instance, banks do not charge any fee for counting a large amount of coins now, but in the future they may charge their clients for such services.” Zhou’s remarks about negative interest rates are arguably the biggest giveaway as to what is going on here. If people are holding cash outside of banks, reckless, Keynesian NIRP policies won’t have the desired effect of coercing spending in the populace.
New Zealand Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr agrees with Zhou:
Let’s tax cash holdings, simple as that: we’re back to monetary policy as usual; people are disincentivised to be holding large lumps of physical cash; they are having to think harder about putting money to work.
Big Tech: We’ll Create the Digital Money, Thank You
While draconian government monetary policy is alarming, the lack of support for actual financial sovereignty in the crypto and tech space is indicative of another problem. Government’s designs on eliminating paper money and fighting permissionless, decentralized crypto exchange — both moves to control money supply and populations of individuals — are obvious, and to be expected. But even big tech companies and exchanges like Facebook and Binance are jumping on the propaganda bandwagon, dragging many well-meaning enthusiasts into the fight against financial freedom (even if unintentionally) right along with them.
“We believe that we all have a responsibility to help advance financial inclusion, support ethical actors, and continuously uphold the integrity of the ecosystem.” – Libra whitepaper
“This is why we believe in and are committed to a collaborative process with regulators, central banks, and lawmakers…” – Facebook’s David Marcus
“Binance is looking to create new alliances and partnerships with governments, corporations, technology companies, and other cryptocurrency companies and projects involved in the larger blockchain ecosystem, to empower developed and developing countries to spur new currencies.” – Binance’s ‘Venus’ announcement
The common theme here is eager compliance with Keynesian value destroyers. And these examples are illustrative of the true financial epidemic.
Forced ‘Perfection’
Digital currencies really are extremely convenient. Everybody in the world really should have a chance at financial inclusion. Holding wads of paper cash and coins really can be a bother, as well as a safety hazard, where crime is concerned. In Finland, passengers on state railways won’t be able to purchase tickets with cash for long-distance trips, starting in September. Much easier than messing with the paper stuff. ATMs are becoming less common worldwide, even in countries like China, the U.S., and cash-obsessed Japan. Settlements and payments can be made effortlessly, though, with just a quick scan or entering a PIN, so it’s no big deal.
But this is not a perfect world. Governments are corrupt. Artificial monopolies and seas of red tape exist, keeping the life-threateningly impoverished and entrepreneurial from accessing crypto and banking services via strict KYC and AML policy, and by mandating, like Modi in India, that their hard-earned and hard-saved money is worthless. People already have the opportunity for extreme financial inclusion. A $40 smartphone and an internet connection enables anyone, anywhere in the world, to make or receive money with Bitcoin. In the name of regulation, safety, and financial inclusion, however, the state makes the situation more chaotic, less safe, and extremely exclusive where real human need is concerned.
Some of us crazy people still like paper cash, and prefer to pay that way. Some annoying, behind-the-times luddites still put money in their mattresses, where global financial policy turns more and more toward negative rates, continued inflation, and devaluation of money sitting in banks. Some entrepreneurs and tech-savvy fans of crypto simply think it’s nobody else’s damn business, preferring paper wallets, coin shuffling, and VPNs, in a world where everyone but those in power are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Some of us “conspiracy nuts” just like crypto for crypto, and paper cash is still closer to that clean and private model than any slimy, centralized digital state currency could ever hope to be.
Do you think there is a global push to end cash? Let us know in the comments section below.
OP-ed disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, fair use.
The post The Push to Kill Cash – Australia’s Proposed Ban Shows It’s Not Conspiracy Theory appeared first on Bitcoin News.
https://cryptoveins.com/2019/08/the-push-to-kill-cash-australias-proposed-ban-shows-its-not-conspiracy-theory/
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coin-news-blog · 5 years
Text
The Push to Kill Cash – Australia’s Proposed Ban Shows It’s Not Conspiracy Theory
New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/news/the-push-to-kill-cash-australia-s-proposed-ban-shows-it-s-not-conspiracy-theory
The Push to Kill Cash – Australia’s Proposed Ban Shows It’s Not Conspiracy Theory
The Push to Kill Cash – Australia’s Proposed Ban Shows It’s Not Conspiracy Theory
The supposed coordination of governments and tech companies to create a one-world, cashless society is often viewed as little more than fodder for silly Youtube conspiracy videos. After all, cash is still king in daily life, even in extremely high-tech, innovative societies like Japan. Upon closer examination, though, current realities like Australia’s proposed cash transaction ban for 2020, the continuing removal of higher denomination bills from several world economies, and the creation of centralized, state cryptocurrencies by governments worldwide cannot be ignored. These trends signal a global push to kill paper money in the name of safety, security, and financial inclusion.
You Can Pay, But It Better Be Our Way
Australia’s “Black Economy Taskforce” wants to put people accepting over 10,000 AUD (~$6,750) in cash in the slammer for up to two years, or fine them up to 25,000 (~$16,890), in an ostensible bid to fight black market economies. The Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019 states:
Transactions equal to, or in excess of this amount would need to be made using the electronic payment system or by cheque. The Black Economy Taskforce recommended this action to tackle tax evasion and other criminal activities.
Long lines of people wait to exchange their obsolete rupee notes in India.
Note the similarity here with talking points of other governments. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, when announcing the devastating surprise removal of 86% of the country’s circulating paper cash in 2016, proclaimed:
Black money and corruption are the biggest obstacles in eradicating poverty.
Not surprisingly, Modi’s shock move put the dominantly cash-based society in a panic, forcing people to take their now worthless 1,000 and 500 rupee notes to banks within 50 days of the announcement, to exchange them for smaller denominations. Now The Royal Bank of India is moving to ban all cryptocurrencies but one, the state-approved, digital rupee.
500-dollar federal reserve notes were officially discontinued in 1969.
The removal of large cash bills is a worldwide, ongoing reality, with the European Central Bank (ECB) stopping production of the 500 euro note earlier this year. The note, dubbed by the media as “the Bin Laden,” was said to be used disproportionately in financing terrorism. The U.S. used to have banknotes worth $500 and higher as well, some which were known as gold certificates, entitling the bearer to physical gold upon redemption. As fractional reserve banking took over, however, and national debt increased, these systems were progressively abandoned. The trend continues today in the form of Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP), and the resultant push for digitization of money.
Stop Holding Cash and Take Our Debt
“If everyone is holding cash, negative interest rates become useless.” These are the words of former People’s Bank of China (PBOC) governor Zhou Xiaochuan after the Chinese government had just completed a trial run of their new national cryptocurrency back in 2017. Now the country’s sovereign digital currency is “almost ready.” Zhou has also officially stated:
At the current stage, the central bank’s major goal of issuing digital currency is to replace the physical cash.
Earlier in the same interview, he maintained that “The cost for cash transaction will gradually increase in the later stage. For instance, banks do not charge any fee for counting a large amount of coins now, but in the future they may charge their clients for such services.” Zhou’s remarks about negative interest rates are arguably the biggest giveaway as to what is going on here. If people are holding cash outside of banks, reckless, Keynesian NIRP policies won’t have the desired effect of coercing spending in the populace.
New Zealand Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr agrees with Zhou:
Let’s tax cash holdings, simple as that: we’re back to monetary policy as usual; people are disincentivised to be holding large lumps of physical cash; they are having to think harder about putting money to work.
Big Tech: We’ll Create the Digital Money, Thank You
While draconian government monetary policy is alarming, the lack of support for actual financial sovereignty in the crypto and tech space is indicative of another problem. Government’s designs on eliminating paper money and fighting permissionless, decentralized crypto exchange — both moves to control money supply and populations of individuals — are obvious, and to be expected. But even big tech companies and exchanges like Facebook and Binance are jumping on the propaganda bandwagon, dragging many well-meaning enthusiasts into the fight against financial freedom (even if unintentionally) right along with them.
“We believe that we all have a responsibility to help advance financial inclusion, support ethical actors, and continuously uphold the integrity of the ecosystem.” – Libra whitepaper
“This is why we believe in and are committed to a collaborative process with regulators, central banks, and lawmakers…” – Facebook’s David Marcus
“Binance is looking to create new alliances and partnerships with governments, corporations, technology companies, and other cryptocurrency companies and projects involved in the larger blockchain ecosystem, to empower developed and developing countries to spur new currencies.” – Binance’s ‘Venus’ announcement
The common theme here is eager compliance with Keynesian value destroyers. And these examples are illustrative of the true financial epidemic.
Forced ‘Perfection’
Digital currencies really are extremely convenient. Everybody in the world really should have a chance at financial inclusion. Holding wads of paper cash and coins really can be a bother, as well as a safety hazard, where crime is concerned. In Finland, passengers on state railways won’t be able to purchase tickets with cash for long-distance trips, starting in September. Much easier than messing with the paper stuff. ATMs are becoming less common worldwide, even in countries like China, the U.S., and cash-obsessed Japan. Settlements and payments can be made effortlessly, though, with just a quick scan or entering a PIN, so it’s no big deal.
But this is not a perfect world. Governments are corrupt. Artificial monopolies and seas of red tape exist, keeping the life-threateningly impoverished and entrepreneurial from accessing crypto and banking services via strict KYC and AML policy, and by mandating, like Modi in India, that their hard-earned and hard-saved money is worthless. People already have the opportunity for extreme financial inclusion. A $40 smartphone and an internet connection enables anyone, anywhere in the world, to make or receive money with Bitcoin. In the name of regulation, safety, and financial inclusion, however, the state makes the situation more chaotic, less safe, and extremely exclusive where real human need is concerned.
Some of us crazy people still like paper cash, and prefer to pay that way. Some annoying, behind-the-times luddites still put money in their mattresses, where global financial policy turns more and more toward negative rates, continued inflation, and devaluation of money sitting in banks. Some entrepreneurs and tech-savvy fans of crypto simply think it’s nobody else’s damn business, preferring paper wallets, coin shuffling, and VPNs, in a world where everyone but those in power are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Some of us “conspiracy nuts” just like crypto for crypto, and paper cash is still closer to that clean and private model than any slimy, centralized digital state currency could ever hope to be.
Source: news.bitcoin
0 notes
rolandfontana · 5 years
Text
China’s Tax Reductions: Look This Gift Horse Very Carefully in the Mouth
The tax man cometh and taketh away. ALWAYS.
There has been a lot of press lately of how China is reducing business taxes to stimulate its declining economy. This is all well and good but when it comes to taxes — especially China taxes — there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Yes, China is reducing various VAT rates and mandatory employer pension contributions but it also is moving ever apace in tightening up its tax enforcement capabilities and these enforcement changes will and already has impacted foreign businesses more than the tax reductions. As our regular readers know, we have for at least a decade written about how China has consistently and inexorably tightened its laws and tightened its law enforcement, especially as against foreign companies. See e.g., Doing Business in China Without a WFOE: Will the Defendant Please Rise.
Official Chinese publications on its tax decreases talk of how tax collections will actually rise, due in part to changes in law to force individuals and businesses onto China’s tax “grid” and due to stepped up tax enforcement. For an example of legal changes that will bring “hidden” businesses to light, check out China’s Daigou Shopping Model: This is the End, My Friend…. The Bank of China recently issued a notice requiring China’s banks to report all transactions exceeding certain amounts with the plan for some of the accounts involved in those transactions to be turned over to the tax authorities for further investigation. Foreign companies, I’m talking to you. China has also enacted various laws to name and shame and penalize individuals connected with businesses that fail to fully comply with China’s increasingly stringent tax laws.
Foreign businesses operating in China can and must protect themselves by doing the following (somewhat obvious) things:
Determine whether they are or are not doing business in China. If you have anyone on the ground in China on behalf of your company the odds are good that you are doing business there and you owe all sorts of taxes for that. See again, Doing Business in China Without a WFOE: Will the Defendant Please Rise.
Hire a good accounting firm and a good bookkeeper to make sure you are doing everything right on your China taxes.
Don’t listen to anyone but your own accountants and bookkeepers and lawyers about what you should be doing regarding your China taxes.
Just because you know of others who are not paying certain taxes does not in any way justify your not paying those taxes.
Be wary of anyone — either inside or outside your company — who in any way minimizes the need to pay China taxes.
At the end of 2018, in How’s Your China WFOE? Please Check, we wrote of how “at the end of every year, our law firm always gets a slew of emails and phone calls from foreigners in big trouble in China.” The post then talked of how “in past years the trouble has mostly involved unpaid taxes, usually with the following sort of scenario:
Foreigner (disproportionately Northern European) calls to say that they are in their home country for the holidays and they have learned that the “tax man” has come by and is extremely unhappy about the company not having reported all of its China earnings. The person wants to know whether it is safe for him (it has 100% of the time been a male) to return to China. Three more minutes of talking reveals that this company has not even come close to paying its China taxes and the person on the other end of the line “justifies” this by saying his Chinese accountant told him that “nobody pays these taxes.” I very dispassionately tell this person that I don’t know what percentage of foreign companies pay their China taxes, but that the China attorneys at my firm advice all our clients to pay all their taxes and that is in large part because China LOVES going after foreign companies that don’t pay all their taxes AND has gotten really good at catching those that don’t. I then tell him that he absolutely should not go back to China unless and until his company has cleared up all back taxes, with interest and with penalties. I got only one such phone call (so far) this year.
Though we are not even three months into 2019, it feels like we have gotten more tax trouble calls this year than all of 2018 combined. These are calls involving employer taxes, company and personal income taxes, and custom duties (especially). And in nearly every instance the problem has stemmed from a foreign company (so far just North American and European companies) not paying taxes based on some misguided belief that no taxes were owed. Do not choose your accountant based on an “ability” to save you money. Choose an accountant who provides you with the real life advice you need.
Tomorrow I am going to write about flat out bad China WFOE formation companies and how those same companies show up again when it comes to providing flat out bad China tax and accounting advice and how those two things are so intimately tied together.
In the meantime, be careful out there.
China’s Tax Reductions: Look This Gift Horse Very Carefully in the Mouth syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/
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