A fairly brutalist design that feels incredibly out of place in the Texas Hill Country, with its hallmark bungalows and modern wood-paneled angular homes.

the city would be home to a new, massive car-making factory — the largest in the world by volume, according to Elon

The commitment to spectacle at the Tesla Gigafactory was impressive

Many of his friends also use apps to trade in foreign currencies, cryptocurrency, or foreign stocks—options that weren’t unavailable even a few years ago.

in lobbying universities to block betting sites on their networks:

to introduce an app that allows addicts to block access to all gambling sites on their devices

Data from Safaricom, which controls more than 99% of Kenya’s mobile money market, shows that M-Pesa users’ transactions with betting sites were worth $737 million in the six months ending in September 2021, up from $436 million in the same period of 2020.

to tighter regulations and a growing awareness that sports betting is “not as rosy” as many had thought.

gambling firms can no longer advertise on radio and TV during daytime hours.

New taxes on stakes and winnings appear to have incentivized some bettors to cut back

betting firms themselves have become important sources of employment

taxes derived from betting have become an important source of revenue for Kenya’s cash-strapped government

Some argue that Kenya should ban sports betting entirely.

seven out of 10 with gambling disorders.

One 2016 poll at Kenyatta University found that 78% of male and 57% of female students had tried betting, with nearly half gambling at least once per week (and 80% reporting net losses).

Kenyans were spending $1.3 billion a year to place bets on the platform—more than the annual budget of the country’s Ministry of Health.

SportPesa, a firm founded in Nairobi by a group of Bulgarian and Kenyan investors, including a former mayor of the city, was the vanguard. Established in 2014, it offered a sleek online interface that allowed users to fund accounts via M-Pesa and place bets on matches from around the globe within seconds

“People believe that when you do genuine bets, when you take time to do good analyzation, you can win.”

“Nowadays in Kenya, we term betting as a job,”

New undersea cables and an influx of Chinese-branded smartphones had drastically reduced the cost of getting online (today an estimated 85% of the population has access to a connection).

Kenya’s status as an early tech adopter helped fuel the trend.

“People are comparing themselves not just with their neighbors but with everyone, even strangers from across the globe,” Ogachi says. “That breeds an even higher level of frustration.”

citizens have long complained that this new wealth hasn’t trickled down.

the country’s GDP doubled in the 15 years before the pandemic

there were 310 mobile money services available in 96 countries, with 300 million active accounts—more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

improves resilience to financial shocks and facilitates higher rates of household saving.

access to M-Pesa helped pull 2% of Kenya’s households out of extreme poverty

In 2006, according to the Central Bank of Kenya, only 27% of Kenyan adults had access to formal financial services, such as means for saving, borrowing, or making non-cash payments. Thanks to M-Pesa, 84% do now

Today, Safaricom boasts 30 million active M-Pesa accounts in Kenya, roughly equivalent to the country’s adult population

Safaricom invested heavily in building a network of agents who acted like human ATMs so recipients could withdraw cash from their digital wallets

sending money home

to disburse and repay microfinance loans.

When online betting came along, it found this ideal system was in place.”

Most people who bet in Kenya are not doing it for recreation—they’re doing it because they want to make money,”

a December 2021 survey by the US research firm GeoPoll found that 84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis.

M-Pesa’s role in betting presents something of a paradox. T

not an entirely digital phenomenon

The practice has produced tales of riches far greater than Kirwa’s, but it has also broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide.

Mobile money has widened financial opportunities in Kenya. It has also made sports betting, which still persists in brick-and-mortar locations even easier.

broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide.

the alarm over the rising popularity of sports betting

matter more in terms of geopolitics than economics.

when asked why India will not ally with America in this democratic cause, the mandarins who run its deep state and shape its foreign policy respond with looks of cynical scorn.

But many are refraining from either openly criticising or penalising Russia, owing to commercial incentives, ideological commitments, strategic ambitions or simple fear.

In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, even longtime allies and clients of America are rebuffing its entreaties to impose sanctions on Russia or merely to criticise it.

Rather than point a finger at Russia, he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

A selective approach would confirm China’s suspicion that, deep down, all countries are guided by interests alone, and use principles as a weapon. China’s challenge to the post-1945 order is in the open now. More cynicism is a weak defence.

“These two superpowers want to change the world. We are capable of stopping it, but it depends on how many friends we have on our side. That will require flexibility and compromises.”

Some diplomats ask whether it is wise to lecture China about repression in Xinjiang at such a moment.

Chinese diplomats have cast Western angst about Ukraine as racist hypocrisy, when much non-European suffering is ignored.

In February this year Mr Xi signed a joint statement with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, that reads like a manifesto for a new order.

It seeks to redefine such terms as “democracy”, calling China’s one-party system more responsive to public needs than dysfunctional Western democracy.

Such aggressions, he said, had left Chinese with strong feelings about human rights, and about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

“No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”.

Charles Michel, that Europeans care greatly about human rights because of the extent of suffering on their soil, notably during the second world war and the Holocaust.

THERE IS NOTHING magic about the year 1945 to China’s Communist Party.

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And Frame.io takes it into a website. It’s basically Google Docs for video.

The privacy regulator says, “Make it really hard to export data,” and the competition regulator says, “Make it easy to export data.” And the engineers at Instagram or YouTube are, like, “Well, we’re engineers. We can do either, but you’re going to have to choose.” All of that is to say, “Yes, regulation, but that’s not one thing. That’s, like, 50 things.”

technology is going to be a quote-unquote “regulated industry” in that sense.

open source just tended to be a better way of making software.

It turns out a free market is just a better way to organize economic activity than central planning. It might be immoral, but functionally it works better

One of them is, open source didn’t exactly let you build software you couldn’t build before.

But behind all of that noise, there’s this very, very powerful, interesting technology that lets you build internet applications, lets you build software in a different way.

Early open-source people thought they were going to destroy Microsoft and no one would ever buy software again. And early internet people thought that this was the end of government, and there’d be no war again, because everyone would understand each other.

Web3 is, well, if you were to build Yelp or Tripadvisor or Twitter on a blockchain, then the users would control it as well.

Crypto, blockchain is an open-source computer, but the code is open as it’s running. It’s not just that you could get the code, it’s that you can see the code as it’s running.

another wave of open source at this point.

“What is a blockchain?” It’s a distributed, decentralized, community-based computing system that has trust incentives, contracts, structure, ownership, portability built in.

That gets you DeFi [decentralized finance]. So this is crypto two, it’s distributed finance. You could build a lending application on this.

But it’s a public database, which is important. It’s not just a database, it’s a public trustless distributed database.

“the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Which was true. It wasn’t any of those things. Cryptocurrency is not cryptography, and it’s not a currency, or not only a currency.

the first wave of crypto

the hardware was good enough to show that this would be cool if we had vastly better hardware.

We tried to do VR in the early ’90s, late ’80s, early ’90s.

So there’s this technology determinism which also applies a bit to Web3, which is to say, look, smartphones, PCs, the internet, cars, aircraft—it starts out looking like a toy and it gets better.

It doesn’t matter how amazingly cool a games console is, it’s still basically not a universal device.

And the same thing now with metaverse—you write a whole bunch of words on a whiteboard. You write “games” and “virtual reality” and “popular culture” and “self-expression,” and maybe “NFTs” and “Web3” as well, maybe. And “augmented reality” and “glasses” and “3-D” and “spatial internet.” You write all this stuff on the board. And then you call it metaverse.

Maybe, but that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen. It may not play out like that.

“All models are wrong, but they’re all useful.”

“History teaches us nothing, except that something will happen.”

there’s a lot of value to looking and seeing, what happened the last time this happened?

there’s always patterns in technology.

this Danish proverb

decacorns (private companies that are worth over $10bn)

“television” and “monolingual”, which mix up Greek and Latin roots

femto- and atto-

pico-

nano-,

It would be the first of the prefixes for huge numbers not to come from the classical languages. “Hell” is a Germanic word.

a new prefix, hella-, for 1027

to zetta- (1,0007) and yotta- (1,0008)

septa- and octo- for 1,0007 and 1,0008

peta- and exa- come from Greek penta (five) and hexa (six), representing 1,0005 and 1,0006

As billions become workaday, tera- will become the new giga-.

teras means “monster”

A megalomaniac has delusions of greatness

Megas, too, was generic in Greek, meaning “great”

Giga- is a prefix meaning “a billion” of something.

a gigafactory in Sunderland

“gigafabs”.

a “gigafactory”

To Russian entrepreneurs living abroad, these workers were a known quantity, and they were not as expensive as specialists in Silicon Valley and other parts of the United States.

And like other tech workers globally, they could continue their work from anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection.

Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly.

An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow.

“Believe me, we have a decent sense of what is in our interest and know how to protect it and advance it.”

Although overall trade between the countries is puny, Russia is South Africa’s second-largest market for apples and pears and its fourth largest for citrus fruit. Even as Russian-flagged ships were being turned away from European and American ports, the Vasiliy Golovnin, a freighter, docked in Cape Town on April 4th. South Africa is also reportedly pursuing a $2bn-a-year deal to buy gas from Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy firm.

Almost half of African countries—25 of 54—abstained or stayed away from the first UN vote. The history of colonialism makes some reluctant to throw support behind what is seen as a Western cause. But others are acting out of growing affinity with Russia. That is true of South Africa, the other big democracy to shrug off the West’s call for unity. It has abstained in all the UN votes.

Citing Argentina, Brazil and Mexico among others, he added, “These countries do not want to be in a position where Uncle Sam orders them to do something and they say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

certain countries “would never accept the global village under the command of the American sheriff”

Signalling independence from the West is an old game in Latin America

“Every time I turn on the television, there’s a Russian making the case for the war,” says a Western ambassador in Jordan. While the big Arabic channels, which have reporters on the ground in Ukraine, have not shied away from recounting the war’s horrors, their coverage is often interspersed with pro-Russian or anti-Western takes.

In the Middle East, only Israel and Libya voted to boot Russia off the Human Rights Council; the abstentions by the Gulf states were a particular disappointment to Western diplomats.

The warm European welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees, compared to that accorded Syrian refugees, prompts eye-rolling. These sorts of concerns are of long standing among Arab states. What has been surprising is the degree to which even American clients have felt free to act on them.

“There’s been an underlying trend that I’ve observed around the UN in the last couple of years, which is that a lot of the countries from the global south have been increasingly co-ordinated in articulating criticisms of the West,” Mr Gowan says. These countries, he continues, “have been feeling more a sense of unity and common purpose than was the case in much of the post-cold war era.”

A related objection is that the West is obsessing over a European conflict that is not a true global concern, while downplaying or ignoring conflicts and human-rights abuses elsewhere.

There’s a big attack from many sides on sanctions being the problem, not the aggressor in this war.

The pattern of abstentions speaks in part to concerns that sanctions on Russia are driving up food and energy prices.

93 to 58, with 24 abstentions

But considered as a bloc, the 40 countries that opposed or abstained from the UN resolution condemning the invasion will probably matter more in terms of geopolitics than economics.

For its part, India has a number of reasons to avoid antagonising Russia: its tradition of neutrality in global conflict, its strategic priority of confronting China, its dependence on Russian military equipment.

he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Click here to view original web page at www.tehrantimes.com

SDS not only affects people’s health but also has a psychological effect, it also has a great negative effect on agricultural products, and on the reproduction of plant species and activities such as beekeeping, he further noted.

In fact, the dust is raised from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in the northeast; Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan in the south, southwest, and west.

Controlling sand and dust storms (SDSs) requires strengthening diplomacy, and it will never be eradicated unless international institutions reach a consensus.

The European Union went still farther, ordering Google and other search engines to delist RT and other Russian state media in addition to blocking the sites themselves from its constituent countries.

The decision is bad news for the Ukrainian government, which has sought to impose a de facto digital iron curtain by revoking Russia’s access to the Domain Name System.

Businesses involving “services, software, hardware, or technology incident to the exchange of communications over the internet” will no longer be subject to the heavy-handed sanctions the US imposed on Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine in February, according to an order issued last week by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

As per Zoom, Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting.

The only gas pipeline to the East now is the Power of Siberia to China, which is not physically connected to a unified gas supply system, so it is impossible to transfer the gas produced in Yamal to China through the extant gas pipeline system. This means that we need to quickly negotiate with China on a Power of Siberia-2. While the concept for this already exists, it is still at the design stage and no specific agreements have been reached,”

The EU is very dependent on Russian gas, but this also means that Russia is very dependent on the European market.

a manifold increase in energy costs due to the high cost of LNG and an inadequate supply of it. In addition, there is insufficient capacity and terminals for LNG storage and receipt in Central and Eastern Europe. There is one relatively large one in Lithuania (Klaipeda), but it will not be enough for all the Baltic countries,” he notes.

“Green energy is good, but we should not forget that it isn’t possible to produce the needed amount of energy with current technology,”

Especially if Russia suddenly stops supplying coal as well.

“This is not a game, but a scenario that needs to be taken very seriously, as it can potentially create deep divisions in the economy and society. From my point of view, it was correct not to immediately start the process of terminating relations with respect to supplies,” German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said, explaining the consequences for his country.

“These simulation engines and the data and everything that goes into them are incredibly important for us to act in these complex environments when it’s not just one crisis but it’s a set of compounding crises,”

to create a complete replica of Earth’s systems over the next decade.

run simulations to see whether that infrastructure is vulnerable to future climate extremes or severe storms,

It’s leading the initiative in partnership with the European Space Agency, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.

“Destination Earth,” will draw on a host of environmental, socioeconomic and satellite data to develop digital “twins” of the planet that aim to help policymakers — and eventually the public — better understand and respond to rising temperatures.

it was mysteriously absent from the “Summary for Policymakers” – traditionally the first part of the report that’s released and often attracts the most media attention.

the Summary for Policymakers must be approved by government representatives from 195 countries around the world; the approval process for this year’s mitigation report was the longest and most contentious in the history of the IPCC.

Neal Stephenson famously coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people.

the metaverse is tough to explain for one reason: it doesn’t necessarily exist.

such narrative-building efforts are likely to intensify further

highlighting that U.S. partners were also victims of malicious cyber activities.

a broader global audience.

new strategy for responding to Washington.

all three reports by Qihoo 360, the report from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT), and the report from Qi An Pangu Lab,

the separate remarks for its spokesperson on U.S. cyberattacks.

Pangu Lab released its report on U.S. cyber espionage,

These reports and testimonies have taken discourse on China’s cyber activities to a global audience, making everyone aware of possible cyber threats arising out of China.

Mandiant, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, has released multiple reports detailing Chinese cyberattacks in the United States.

intensifying its efforts at narrative-building by focusing on malicious cyber activities of the United States.

inequity through experimentation.

The central government does not seem to disentangle the merits of an innovative policy from the idiosyncrasies of the places that pilot it.

The more prosperous an experimental site, the better the chance the policy will be adopted nationwide

80% of experiments since the 1980s have taken place in localities that are richer than average, according to Messrs Wang and Yang

It is a “huge improvement” on a “counterfactual world” in which all central policies are implemented without any experimentation,

the central government has initiated over 630 such experiments since 1980

“Everything through experimentation,” Dewey declared on his tour. Chairman Mao would later repeat the line as China’s ruler.

China’s support for Russia is in part geopolitical, with Mr Putin seen as an irreplaceable comrade in a fight with America. But it involves domestic political calculations, too. Chinese ideologues see benefits in identifying Mr Xi’s brand of nationalism with Mr Putin’s. As long as that holds true, asking Mr Xi to disown Russia and side with the West is like asking him to break with himself.

Above all, the film helps Mr Xi by suggesting that intensely personalised rule is no bad thing, at one point showing young Russians kissing images of Mr Putin.

they believe in crony capitalism, not Marxism.

The film is revealingly odd

Mr Xi blames the Soviet collapse on “historical nihilism”, jargon for allowing ideological foes to dwell on dark episodes in history.

This says that Mr Putin attacked Ukraine in self-defence, after America encroached on Russia by pushing European nations into the NATO military alliance.

n special classes

Rule 8742 [127]

our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.

by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting.

competition and co-operation lead to the exchange of ideas, benefiting all

as long as CATL brought battery-manufacturing tech and know-how in order to foster technology transfer to American firms.

EVs encompass many of the strategic tensions that burden the trading system. They are heavily reliant on semiconductors, which has become a sore point in China, and on batteries, Chinese dominance of which is a bugbear for the West. They are hugely subsidised. The harvesting of personal information to improve traffic routes, charging and self-driving technology raises thorny questions about privacy, data storage and cyber-security. The EV industry is also exposed to trade wars: since 2018 America has levied 25% tariffs on Chinese battery cells, electric motors and other EV components.

The more high-quality Chinese products appeal to international consumers, the more of a stake China has in preserving global trade.

Yet they have their own built-in advantages, including access to the best battery supply in the world and in some cases more sophisticated software than European rivals. China is also taking international safety standards more seriously.

That means selling low-cost EVs where Western companies do not venture, in order to strengthen supply chains. Taxi fleets are a popular target for firms like BYD.

SAIC, a state-owned car company, is making inroads in Europe under the cover of MG, a classic British sports-car brand that it bought in 2007.

For years China led the world in production and purchase of EVs.

burnout is as much of a risk as slacking.

do-not-disturb protocols

Defining what kinds of work can be done asynchronously and what requires everyone to get together is a recipe for fewer, better meetings.