Even Donald Trump’s solar tariffs and desire to prop up the coal industry can’t stop renewable energy. A solar auction in Nevada just yielded the cheapest solar project in the country.

It broke a record that was set [checks calendar] last week. Not only that, the price the plant will operate at is cheaper than new natural gas and coal plants. While the sunny weather in Nevada and federal tax credits certainly play a role, it’s also part of a clear trend of solar power becoming cost-competitive with and even starting to beat fossil fuels.

The project in question is the Eagle Shadow Mountain Solar Farm, which will begin operating in 2021. The farm will have a generating capacity of 300 megawatts, enough to power about 210,000 American homes. But it’s the price part that’s eye-popping. It will operate at a flat rate of $23.76 per megawatt-hour over the course of a 25-year power purchasing agreement (the term for a contract between an electricity generator and utility who buys it). On the surface, that price may not mean a lot to you if you’re not an energy nerd, but it’s a huge deal.

“On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”

There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”

The price and size of the plant handily beats the cheapest confirmed solar project in the country, a title that formerly belonged to a piddly 30 megawatt farm in Arizona that was part of an effort to replace the aging Navajo Generating Station (some tribal members aren’t happy). That project was auctioned for the low, low price of $24.99 per megawatt-hour over the duration of its 20-year contract.

The Nevada auction also included a number of projects that link up utility-scale solar with batteries. Mastering solar plus storage will be critical for renewables to truly overtake fossil fuels, since they only generate power when it’s sunny or when the wind blows.

“Three years ago you almost never saw batteries as part of a new solar or wind project,” Naam said. “In 2018, we’ve seen battery storage frequently show up as part of these bids. Energy storage is becoming the new normal with solar bids.”

All these projects have one important have one important factor in common: being located in the sunny Southwest. That geography absolutely plays a role in keeping prices low. But increasingly efficient technology also helps, and Naam said these prices are a bellwether of what’s to come in the next few years in places like Texas, California, and Colorado.

They also show that the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up fossil fuels at the expense of renewables aren’t enough to push solar out to sea. The tariffs that Trump levied earlier this year against cheap solar panels imported from China could eventually dampen installations. Naam said they add roughly 10 percent to the price of utility-scale projects, but “at most, they move the price of solar back by about a year.”

And they haven’t slowed solar deployments yet. A report released by the Solar Energy Industries Association on Tuesday revealed that 55 percent of all U.S. electricity generating capacity installed in the first quarter of 2018 was solar. A whopping 2.5 gigawatts of solar was added, marking the 10th straight quarter where more than 2 gigawatts of capacity added. The report also noted that total installed capacity could double in the next five years.

All this is good news, but the transition away from fossil fuels towards renewables needs to happen even faster to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

https://earther.com/solar-just-hit-a-record-low-price-in-the-u-s-1826830592

I mean -- most of the goods targeted aren't those cheap Chinese goods that we buy on Amazon and eBay. So unless new tariffs are released targetting these items, you're not going to see a change at all.

China is at a huge disadvantage in this 'trade war' though, as Chinese manufacturing relies heavily on American consumers -- you can't just make 500b in consumers come out of nowhere. If the Trump administration really wants to, I think they're going to be able to force China to come to the table with real reform on free and fair trade and the protection of intellectual property. As of right now, America is getting SCREWED.

I'm happy to see this go on, China will lose at the end of this though. They just don't have the same set of defenses in place to beat us when they rely so heavily on our consumers.

At the Genesis London blockchain conference held in February by Binary District, Cornell professor, cryptocurrency expert, and computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer said in an interview that a study done by prestigious university Cornell has shown the Ethereum blockchain network is currently more decentralized than bitcoin.

Ever since the debut of Ethereum in 2015, false information about the technology and the foundation of the Ethereum blockchain network have circulated around cryptocurrency communities, leading some investors, users, and developers to believe the Ethereum network is inferior to other major blockchains in terms of security and decentralization, given its flexibility and ability to handle large-scale decentralized applications.

A study done by Cornell professor Sirer and researchers at the institution has shown that less Ethereum nodes are linked to institutions or organizations than bitcoin, which means that more nodes on the Ethereum network are operated by individuals rather than companies.

“The data shows that the [Ethereum] nodes are both in the latency space, and also geographically more distributed round the world. Ethereum nodes tend to come from all sorts of places, smaller networks, and homegrown entities, as opposed to Bitcoin nodes, which tend to be located in data centres. Our study found that the majority of Bitcoin nodes, 56%, are in data centres,” said Sirer.

Ethereum is structurally and fundamentally different to bitcoin because its network is optimized to handle decentralized applications (dapps). The Ethereum network should be able to process thousands of transactions per second in the long-term to support dapps in the size of Facebook or Twitter, as Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam previously noted.

In an interview with South Korea’s biggest mainstream media outlet JoongAng, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin emphasized that full scalability of Ethereum could take 3 to 5 years, depending on the implementation process of innovative scaling solutions like Plasma and Sharding.

Sharding significantly optimizes the process of mining through the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm by eliminating competition amongst miners. Instead of miners spending computing power to win individual blocks, miners can cooperate to solve mathematical problems so that computing power is not lost.

Plasma is a highly anticipated solution that is currently being developed by the open-source community of Ethereum developers that can allow various blockchains within the Ethereum network to handle different tasks, to reduce the burden on the main Ethereum blockchain.

At the conference, Sirer also noted that hardware-based technologies such as Intel SGX can help public blockchains like bitcoin and Ethereum to settle thousands of transactions per second. SGX is existent on all Intel devices such as laptops, and with it, users can send zero-confirmation transactions in a peer-to-peer manner, without straining the main blockchain. Sirer explained:

“SGX is a very exciting technology, and there are other trusted computing technologies, not SGX, but by other vendors, that provide similar guarantees. What that gives you is the ability to know what protocol somebody else is following. That is a fundamental leap.”

In the long-term Sirer said that a rapidly increasing number of institutions, conglomerates, retailers, and companies in general will shift towards the blockchain, moving away from centralized databases. But, because problems surrounding blockchains are very technical, Sirer echoed the viewpoint of Buterin in saying that it could take many years of development and significant resources to properly commercialize blockchain technology.

“Blockchains actually constitute an enormous opportunity to rethink the way we build backend systems. Instead of building things in the old fashioned way, with centralised databases that talk to each other, that need to be reconciled, that need to be kept in sync, we can actually now build much more efficient distributed databases that share information naturally, in a seamless manner,” Sirer added.

https://www.ccn.com/genesis-london-conference-study-shows-ethereum-is-more-decentralized-than-bitcoin/

It happened again. Tax receipts soared in the United States after the recent tax cuts.

Although it will take a while for the full effect of the 2017 tax reform to kick in, U.S. state and local government tax revenue climbed to $350.2 billion in the first quarter of 2018, a rise of 5.8 percent compared with the same time period in 2017. Individual income tax collections had big gains for a second-straight quarter with a 12.8 percent increase to $107.4 billion in 2018’s first quarter.

But the evidence of the positive impact on growth, jobs, and wages of lower corporate taxes has been published in many studies over time. The example of more than 200 cases in 21 countries shows that tax cuts and expenditure reductions are much more effective in boosting growth and prosperity than increasing government spending.

Multiple studies conclude that in more than 170 cases, the impact of tax cuts has been much more positive for growth.

In Denial
However, some commentators continue to deny the positive impact of tax cuts using the argument that deficits rise.

The fallacy that 'deficits rise' has nothing to do with tax cuts, but with increases in government spending on top of the tax cuts.

The deficit excuse is very simple. It says taxes should not be cut because governments will spend all revenues, even if these increase, and more. But this excuse is wrong.

The mistake of pointing at deficits as proof that tax cuts don’t work is debunked by looking at the proposals of the same economists that argue against tax cuts. Economist Paul Krugman is one example. He argued against tax cuts in his New York Times article “Time to Borrow” after the Obama administration increased debt by $10 trillion. These demand-side economists defend deficit spending, yet consider tax cuts as negative … because deficits may increase. Only Keynesian economists manage to pull off such mindbending logic.

Deficits need not rise or exist at all if governments spend in line with revenue growth. And the evidence points to rising revenues from lower taxes and higher growth.

Deficit Spending
While analyzing the deficits of the G-20 economies during the past 15 years, we found that more than 80 percent come from higher spending. Even in the 2008–2010 crisis, European government deficits were explained more by the “stimulus” plans and government spending increases than any loss of revenues.

Spain, for example, lost 40 billion euros of tax revenues from the bursting of the real estate bubble but deficits rose by 300 billion euros, driven by stimulus and automatic “stabilizers.” The European Union spent almost 1.5 percent of its GDP on stimuli and increased taxes, sending deficits and debt to GDP to all-time highs.  The United States increased taxes by $1.5 trillion under the Obama administration but the average deficit was 5 percent of GDP. The final tally was a $10 trillion increase in national debt.

During the Obama administration and the massive expansionary monetary policies of three rounds of quantitative easing (QE) and ultra-low interest rates, economic growth on average was only 1.4 percent and 2.1 percent if we exclude the crash year of 2009. That compares to an average of 3.5 percent during the Reagan administration, 3.9 percent during Clinton’s, and 2.1 percent during Bush Jr.’s.

Positive Effects
The evidence of the positive effects of tax cuts on jobs and growth is clear.

The 2018 “Economic Report of the President” shows that tax cuts generated more federal revenues even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

President John F. Kennedy’s major tax cut, which included chopping the top marginal rate to 70 percent from 91 percent, became law in early 1964. The economy grew at an average 5.5 percent, and unemployment fell to 3.8 percent. In turn, the annual deficit shrank to $1 billion from $7 billion as individual income-tax receipts nearly doubled.

President Ronald Reagan cut the top personal rate from 70 percent all the way down to 28 percent. Between 1982, when the first round of Reagan’s across-the-board tax cuts went into effect, and 1990, when President George H.W. Bush broke his no-new-taxes pledge, individual tax receipts jumped 57 percent to $467 billion.

And even President Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses didn’t materialize until after the president in 1997 signed a GOP tax bill that cut the capital-gains rate to 20 percent from 28 percent. Tax receipts from capital gains soared as capital investment more than tripled. Between 1996 and 2000, “the increase in capital gains revenues accounted for a little over 20 percent of the total increase in federal revenues,” former Treasury official Bruce Bartlett said. For the first time, individual tax receipts hit $1 trillion.

After President George W. Bush in 2003 signed the largest tax cut since Reagan—including dropping the top marginal rate to 35 percent from 39.6 percent—government receipts from individual income taxes rose from $794 billion to a peak of $1.2 trillion in 2007, when the mortgage crisis began—a jump of 47 percent.

Stronger economic growth expanded the tax base and brought in so much revenue that Bush more than halved the deficit over that period.

There are plenty more examples globally. Professor Juan Manuel Lopez-Zafra from CUNEF in Madrid points to a few:

• Russia introduced a 13 percent flat tax in 2001. Revenues rose 25 percent in 2002, and a further 24 percent and 15 percent in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Revenues rose 80 percent in three years. Russia is a country where government deficit spending is limited and the excuse of deficits does not mask the revenue improvement.
• In 2012, Hungary implemented a 16 percent flat tax. Tax revenues soared 7.6 percent despite a decline in GDP of 1.6 percent. In its 2016 report, the OECD showed that the key to Hungary’s recovery was its tax system.
• Ireland cut taxes to corporates to 12.5 percent from 50 percent and reduced the value-added tax, and tax revenues soared 67 percent. Between 2010 and 2017, Ireland’s tax revenues increased 21 percent and thanks to an attractive tax policy, Ireland is one of the few Eurozone countries that left the crisis with growth, lower unemployment and cutting deficits. Because spending did not soar.
• Spain finally decided to cut taxes in 2015 and in 2016 and tax revenues grew 4.3 percent, more than nominal GDP, a level of increase that accelerated in 2017. Unfortunately, governments took the opportunity to increase expenditure, so deficits remained.
• UK corporation tax receipts surged to a record high in 2017, up 21 percent rise from 2016 and an all-time high, despite the main rate falling from 30 percent in 2008 to 19 percent. The United Kingdom cut the corporate tax rate and did not lose any revenue. It paid for itself.
• Corporate tax and marginal income tax have been reduced in the Nordic countries since the 2000s, and revenues have increased well above nominal GDP.

The evidence is clear. Tax cuts boost jobs, growth, and, in most cases, revenues. Those who choose to ignore it tend to do so because of a misguided view that governments need to spend more and that private individuals and companies make too much money.

But there is no public sector without a thriving private sector. Taxes cannot be a burden for growth and job creation because governments decide they want to spend more.

Deficits are no excuse for tax cuts. Deficits need to be addressed by curbing spending. Tax cuts are a necessary tool to keep an ever-expanding bureaucratic system from destroying the economy.

Giving back citizens and job creators part of their own money so consumption and productive investment continue to improve is not just economic logic—it is the right thing to do.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-11/evidence-clear-tax-cuts-work

Ok! I was actually trying to get reasons why people get addicted to gambling which we all know is more self inflicted. However, I came up with this theory for someone who may actually want to gamble and then would not want to get addicted based on trying to fix their mentality about it and I would like to seek your opinion on what you think about it, if it can actually end up working for any gambler or not.

The theory is;
If you want to gamble, see it more like you are paying the casino or gambling platform to have some fun (just like you do to go watch some movies in cinema), which if you are paying for anything, you are not meant to expect it back. The good thing however is that, you can actually end up being paid more for having that fun if you get lucky, but the chances of seeing that happen is pretty slim. In that light, if you cannot actually live with doing what I said above, then you should not be gambling at all.

Does this sound like a mentality that can help anyone understand what they are in for if they indeed want to gamble or something even those who are tending towards addiction can set their mind to so as not to get into that deep gambling hole that is hard to come out from?

You might not want to get into development of land. I live in a country where houses are fucking expensive, construction companies are getting doomed, and Real Estate businesses are borrowing loans and shutting down their Real Estate business indefinitely, and fleeing the country forever. Its better to just stay in crypto, you know. Real life jobs are scary as fuck, am seeing more terminations than hiring and the country I live in is one of the richest and the costliest. The risk is too much to handle, just don't put yourself in the quicksand.

DRIPS just seem to be buying back of shares with the dividends that investors receive. They are still taxed, even if the investors don't receive it. Only advantage is, they get more shares at a discounted price and they don't have to pay a commission.

The SEC always hated the whistleblower program that Congress imposed on it as part of Dodd Frank reforms. Congress was responding to the SEC’s grotesque institutional failure in ignoring Harry Markopolos’ repeated, detailed warnings about the Bernie Madoff fraud, a Ponzi scheme that reached $65 billion due to SEC inaction.

But as we’ll describe, the SEC issued new guidance – on a Saturday night in the summer – that guts the whistleblower program by imposing new standards that look to be contrary to the intent of Congress by making it difficult to win awards for large-scale frauds, and then reducing the payouts on them. It looks like career-minded SEC officials who resented that whistleblower filings could force them to probe wrong-doings of prospective employers are making sure the agency will only hand out parking tickets.

Admittedly, Congress had set out to enfeeble the SEC, by keeping it budget-starved and having Congressmen like Joe Lieberman threaten to cut its funding even further if it went too aggressively after big financiers. The agency had retreated to focusing enforcement almost entirely on insider trading, to the degree that became almost incapable of seeing the world any other way. For instance, it botched its first major crisis case involving the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds, by bizarrely pursuing the execs managing the funds as insider traders, rather than understanding that they were victims of other Wall Street firms (and perhaps even Bear’s own trading desks) that were selling toxic subprime mortgage securities and CDOs. ‘

Nevertheless, the new whistleblower program established an awards fund entirely outside the SEC’s budget, and also tasked the SEC to set up a “Whistleblower Office.” The agency was obligated to pay sources compensation set as a portion of the SEC’s recovery if they contributed information that was valuable to an enforcement action.

The program went live in 2012, and under Chairman Mary Jo White, the SEC feigned enthusiasm for the new initiative, dutifully reporting how many tips it had received and asking for more funding to do a better job, even as high level SEC insiders grumbled about how the whistleblower program trampled on the agency’s discretion.

Last Saturday, in the dead of night, the SEC moved to make explicit, with the release of draft rule revisions, what close observers long suspected, that despite the agency’s weak support for whistleblowers, they have proven nevertheless too successful.

The proposed new rules have two main thrusts. First, they would change the formula for computing whistleblower awards so that large awards would receive fewer dollars. Second, new barriers to receiving awards would be placed in front of whistleblowers who include any public information in their evidence of wrong-doing. The reason that matters, as we’ll explain in detail, is that whistleblowers who provide evidence of widespread or systemic frauds will almost certainly be relying significantly on public information. Perversely, that could even been deemed to include information the whistleblower got into the public domain via FOIA>

In recent years, whistleblowers have complained to us that the SEC has simply failed to respond to award applications. Mind you, we are not talking about the SEC ignoring tips about potential wrong-doing. Most of the SEC filings are along the lines of “Everything JP Morgan does is crooked,” as opposed to actionable information.

Instead, what the SEC frequently doesn’t respond to are the formal “award applications” that whistleblowers submitted after the SEC made an enforcement action where the whistleblower believes his filing made a contribution. The SEC requires that whistleblowers submit these requests in order to be considered for an award within 60 days of the SEC announcing a settlement.

The SEC has been remarkably and indefensibly, opaque about what is clearly a massive backlog of unresolved award claims. The agency produces a ludicrous annual report to Congress of its whistleblower program, full of useless statistics, such as the number of tips received by state, yet it has refused to disclose the number of outstanding award applications or their average age. Only once, in 2015, has it even reported on how many award claims it received in the previous year, which was 120. Contrast this figure with the fact the agency has been resolving about 40 claims a year in recent years. That means the SEC’s backlog of unresolved claims has been growing by approximately two years with each passing year. Its total backlog could realistically be more than five years at this point. That wait to receive an answer on an award is typically on top of the three to four years wait for an enforcement action to be prosecuted and resolved.

The SEC publishes heavily-redacted final orders ruling on each whistleblower award application. We found two recent ones where the agency took around five years to decide (5.25 years in one case and just under five years in the other):

https://www.sec.gov/files/PUBLIC%20FINAL%20ORDER%20-%202012-72.pdf

https://www.sec.gov/files/PUBLIC%20FINAL%20ORDER%20-%202012-24.pdf

In 2015, a Wall Street Journal article entitled SEC Backlog Delays Whistleblower Awards offered a similar snapshot of delay, as well as, the SEC resistance to disclosure:


Later in 2015, the Wall Street Journal also reported on a whistleblower who sued the SEC demanding an answer after waiting three years with no response to his award application. Almost immediately, the SEC coughed up a response, which Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, says was favorable.

Even when the SEC does rouse itself to rule in favor of an award application, the agency has shown a clear bias in favor of penny-ante cases.

Since the inception of the program, more than 60 percent of the awards have been for less than $2 million. While $2 million can seem like a life-changing windfall, keep in mind that many whistleblowers are represented by contingency fee counsel who will take a quarter of the award, and many awards are shared among multiple whistleblowers. As a result, a $2 million total award could ultimately amount to no more than a few hundred thousand dollars to a whistleblower after taking into account these factors, plus taxes. And bear in mind that the best positioned whistleblowers in many cases are highly-placed people in the financial industry who might be making a million or more dollars annually who risk never working again by becoming whistleblowers.

This brings us to the proposed changes to the program. By law, the SEC is required to pay an award to whistleblowers equal to between 10 and 30 percent of any fines, disgorgement, restitution, and interest paid by a defendant in an enforcement case, with the exact amount based on a formula keying off how helpful the whistleblowers were (for example, delay in reporting a fraud lowers the percentage). The SEC is now proposing to include a new factor in the formula, which is how large the recovery is, where larger recoveries would result in a penalty to the formula and small recoveries would receive a formula bonus.

This favoring of small-bore enforcement reflects the longstanding institutional bias of the SEC to chase petty frauds while overlooking big ones, a tendency that is more obvious during Republican administrations but operative in Democratic ones as well.

Trump’s SEC chairman, Jay Clayton, has explicitly promoted an enforcement agenda of re-directing resources away from frauds impacting institutional investors toward frauds impacting retail investors. His patter is, “We’re here for the little guy, and the big guys can fend for themselves,” though that assertion falls apart when you recognize that the institutional frauds he is tolerating impact millions of ordinary people. For example, as we have extensively covered, private equity firms defraud their public pension fund investors. That hurts public workers and taxpayers. Similarly, banks securitize mortgages and sell designed-to-fail CDOs to institutional investors and other banks, which had the effect of severely exacerbating the foreclosure crisis.

Clayton has instead amped up the SEC’s focus on penny stock fraud and very small Ponzi schemes. These frauds impact a tiny sliver of the investing public. Mary Jo White, the SEC chair under Obama, had her own version of this bias, which she articulated as a “broken windows” theory of enforcement. In practice, this meant citing big institutions for petty infractions under the supposed theory that Goldman Sachs and Bank of America would refrain from major frauds if they were fined a few hundred thousand dollars for technical infractions. This approach allowed White, as a good Democrat, to issue press releases naming powerful Wall Street enforcement targets while sparing those targets any real pain.

To their credit, when it was brought before them last week, the two Democratic commissioners on the five person board did vote against the entire proposal to change the whistleblower rules. Commissioner Kara Stein went so far as to question whether the proposed changes were even legal under the Dodd-Frank enabling statute. Their dissent makes it clear that insiders understand the genesis of the proposal, not as some re-balancing justifiable as an improvement to the whistleblower program, but as an explicit attempt to weaken it, including the incentive to report large frauds. After all, if the SEC were concerned merely that the financial incentive to report smaller frauds is too weak, it could simply change the formula to give a bonus in the smallest cases without penalizing awards in the largest cases. This is especially true because the SEC is effectively unconstrained by budget authority in this instance, since Congress appropriated $550 million to initially prime the award pump and authorized the SEC to pay awards from the fines it receives once that initial amount runs low.

Much of the initial press focus has been on the proposal to limit large awards, given the easy-to-grasp hostility to whistleblowers evident in this scheme. However, the much more impactful part of the SEC’s proposal imposes a new standard, misleadingly labeled as a “clarification” of the existing rule, which disqualifies many award claimants whose initial tips include what the SEC expansively considers “public records.” The SEC’s talking point here is that nobody should get paid a whistleblower award for sending the SEC New York Times articles about sketchy financial behavior.

But this extreme example, which Congress already disallowed in the enabling Dodd-Frank legislation, is a red herring.

The real issue is that massive evidence of financial and corporate fraud exists in public documents, including the SEC’s own publicly-accessible databases. The SEC proposes to deny awards based on such public records if the agency determines, in its own opinion, that it could have figured out the fraud without the whistleblower’s help, had it reviewed the public records presented by the whistleblower:


Whistleblower lawyers call this as the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” standard, where the SEC would be relieved from arguing that it did know about a securities law violation prior to receiving a whistleblower’s public records, but instead would merely have to assert that it could have known if it had, for whatever reason, independently reviewed the documents presented by the whistleblower.

This proposal amounts to a middle finger directed at the entire securities analysis industry, where thousands of experts toil over public records looking for, among other things, signs of fraud. Make no mistake, given the resources allocated to them, professional investors are by far the most likely source of insight about credible, large-scale corporate fraud. Those insights are derived largely from public SEC filings. It must be very uncomfortable, whenever the SEC meets with such whistleblowers and asks them to explain the source of their evidence about fraud unknown to the SEC, and the whistleblowers effectively say, “I found it in your file cabinets.”

By contrast, Mary Jo White loved to sing the praises of corporate insider whistleblowers, whom she repeatedly described in public statements as giving the SEC insight into wrong-doing that would otherwise never have been visible to the agency. In other words, to some degree, the agency made its peace with the good citizen, corporate insider “see something, say something” paradigm, especially since the SEC staff was able to tell itself that these people have information advantages that no outside law enforcement person could ever hope to replicate. Stock analysts and professional fraud hunters like Ted Siedle, on the other hand, are at a clear information disadvantage relative to SEC staff, since they can’t do things like subpoena corporate records. Yet we’ve seen lots of evidence that these people are running circles around the SEC staff, In other words, it looks like resentment is driving this proposed change.

It’s also important to recognize that many of the most important securities law violations, in the sense of those that rise to the level of “industry practice,” can really only be uncovered with public records. The obvious reason is that, other than accountants and lawyers, who are barred from receiving awards, almost nobody is an insider at more than one company at a time, so if something pervasive is to be unearthed, it will almost certainly involve information that has leaked into the public domain.

The stock option back-dating scandal from the early 2000s is a classic example of outsiders finding what the SEC missed with the SEC’s won information, though it predated the whistleblower award program. A series of academic papers, leading to a Wall Street Journal series of articles, demonstrated that companies were pervasively back-dating stock options. The revelation leading to the resignation of more than 50 senior executives. How had the professors and the Wall Street Journal unearthed the practice? They simply compared the dates on companies’ more widely viewed SEC filings, which showed earlier dates for the option issuance, with the dates on more obscure, seldom viewed SEC filings, which showed that the options had been issued later.

Had this backdating been unearthed by a whistleblower, would they meet the standard for an award? Who knows? The SEC could merely claim that, if it had bothered to compare these different filings in the relevant cases, it would have spotted the date discrepancy. Notably, the SEC would not need to claim that there is any likelihood that it would have ever looked at this on its own, just that if it had reviewed the needles-in-a-haystack documents, once the whistleblower had done the work of pulling them out of the haystack, they would have figured it out.

Moreover, the SEC’s proposal tries to give comfort by claiming that public documents are admissible if the whistleblower uses them as a basis for “independent analysis,” which means revealing the pattern of fraud that otherwise would not be apparent to the SEC. The SEC contrasts this hazy standard with the non-qualifying action of a whistleblower who merely “aggregates information from multiple different sources.” Again, there is a reasonable argument that, basically, the academics and Wall Street Journal did little more than “aggregate information from multiple sources” in the options backdating case, since once the work of assembling the documents had been completed, it needed effectively no analysis.

We’ve heard over and over that the SEC hates cases implicating a large number of firms in wrong-doing. Such cases present severe staffing challenges for the agency. But more important, they challenge a core ideological assumption of the SEC, which is that wrong-doing is a problem of “a few bad apples.”

This orthodoxy is so strong within the agency that, when evidence of industry-practice lawbreaking emerges, the SEC is known to engage in “it’s me, not you” self-flagellation. This means the SEC embracing a narrative that it failed in some way to properly educate the industry about its legal obligations with respect to the practice where the widespread law-breaking is occurring. You can see how this attitude leads to a hostility toward the people bringing them evidence of widespread wrong-doing and results in the current effort to choke off incentives for such individuals to come forward.

It’s also worth noting that the concept of what the SEC considers a public record is extremely broad and encompasses many types of documents that the agency would effectively never have access to without whistleblowers. For example, a whistleblower might fly from the U.S. to Botswana and then travel hundreds of miles over dirt roads to access records of mine production that exist only on paper in a local government office there. These records could contradict statements that the mine owner makes in SEC filings about their mine productivity, thereby exposing a fraud. Yet the whistleblower in this case would get no credit for knowing the one location on Earth where the mine record exists or for having expended considerable effort to obtain it. Instead, the SEC would apply a test where it would look at the Bostwana mine record and the mining company’s SEC filings, and if the agency considered the fraud to be self-evident based on those, the whistleblower would be barred from an award.

Ultimately, the SEC whistleblower program closely parallels many financial reform initiatives we have chronicled on the blog. They are announced with great fanfare and hailed as showing real promise of implementing lasting reform. But success proves fragile and hostile forces look for every opportunity to weaken the initiative through inaction and bureaucratic strangulation. In moments when they are powerful, as the whistleblower program foes are now, they seek structural changes, often dressed up as mere administrative accommodations, that would permanently kill the program in all but name.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/07/sec-knifes-whistleblower-program.html

"Some of these Tethered cryptocurrencies, such as IMMO, will make some sense, tethering currencies to real estate so that it is more easily tradable for instance".

Source: https://cryptopotato.com/stop-immo-what-do-experts-think-about-bankers-invading-the-crypto-space/

Chinese-designed "Dhyana" x86 processors based on AMD's Zen microarchitecture are beginning to surface from Chinese chip producer Hygon. The processors come as the fruit of AMD's x86 IP licensing agreements with its China-based partners and break the decades-long stranglehold on x86 held by the triumvirate of Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies. Details are also emerging that outline how AMD has managed to stay within the boundaries of the x86 licensing agreements but still allow Chinese-controlled interests to design and sell processors based on the Zen design.

AMD's official statements indicate the company does not sell its final chip designs to its China-based partners. Instead, AMD allows them to design their own processors tailored for the Chinese server market. But the China-produced Hygon "Dhyana" processors are so similar to AMD's EPYC processors that Linux kernel developers have listed vendor IDs and family series numbers as the only difference. In fact, Linux maintainers have simply ported over the EPYC support codes to the Dhyana processor and note that they have successfully run the same patches on AMD's EPYC processors, implying there is little to no differentiation between the chips.

The new chips are surfacing against the backdrop of the trade war between the US and China that could escalate quickly, likely reinforcing China's long-held opinion that a lack of native processor production could be a strategic liability. Today's wars are won with chips, and their strategic importance certainly isn't lost on those in the halls of power. In fact, the Obama administration blocked Intel from selling Xeon processors to China in 2015 over concerns the chips were fueling the country's nuclear programs, and subsequent actions by the US have largely prevented China from achieving the technical know-how and equipment to develop its own chips through acquisitions and mergers.

That makes it even more surprising that AMD has managed to establish a franchise that allows Chinese processor vendors to develop and sell x86 processors in spite of US regulations and the licensing restrictions with Intel, but now more information is coming to light about how AMD pulled off the feat.

Satisfying The x86 Cross-Licensing Agreement
AMD's announcement in 2016 that it had established a joint venture in China to develop processors was surprising, but it yielded a much needed $293 million cash infusion (in payments based on delivery dates) for the then-struggling company, which had operated at a loss for the prior six quarters. AMD is also set to reap royalties, based on unit sales, once the processors begin to ship in volume.

As part of the licensing agreement, AMD established a joint venture (JV) in China called the Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd. (THATIC) and agreed to license its x86 and SoC IP for chip development. THATIC consists of AMD and both public and private Chinese companies, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences that is heavily influenced by the Chinese government.

According to mydrivers.com, THATIC then established two companies through joint ventures: Haiguang Microelectronics Co. Ltd. (HMC) and Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co., Ltd (Hygon).

But here's where things get tricky. AMD holds a 51 percent stake in HMC, while Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 49%. Meanwhile, AMD owns 30% of Hygon and Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 70 percent.

HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a company owned primarily by AMD. But AMD provides the IP with the understanding that the company will use it to design its "own products specifically tailored to the needs of the Chinese server market." That requires quite a bit of maneuvering given the restrictions of AMD's x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel.

To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC.

HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors.

And thus, AMD's licensing of the x86 IP stays within the legal boundaries. According to the agreement, the final products can only be sold within China's borders. That opens up a huge opportunity for AMD via royalties due to the exploding China data center market, but potentially serves a blow to Intel due to the Chinese governments' influence: China has invested heavily in native chip producers through its Made In China 2025 initiative and also offers incentives and other measures to prop up domestic chip production.

China Continues To Invest
It's unclear what the impact of AMD's licensing agreement will have on the long-term outlook for China's chip development ambitions. China is also heavily involved in other chip-producing ventures, such as Zhaoxin Semiconductor, which is working to produce x86 chips through a partnership with VIA. The combination of these efforts, among others, could ultimately provide the country with the independence it desires from US interventions, and possibly alter the long-term processor market in the process.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-zen-x86-processor-dryhana,37417.html

So your monthly expenses for a $20,000 car = $700/month (approx) and for $200,000 car = $4000/month (approx)

1. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. «Why Nations Fail»
2. Ha-Joon Chang. «Economics: The User’s Guide»
3. N. Gregory Mankiw. «Principles of Economics»
4. Robert Pindyck, Daniel Rubinfeld. «Microeconomics»
5. Olivier Blanchard. «Macroeconomics»
6. "Sheep in wolfskins", Walter Block
7. "Capital", Karl Marx
8. "Economics of everything", Alexander Auzan

Further, the ability to borrow against assets allows the economy to grow, as it allows citizens to utilize value without having to sell assets. (it barriers and costs of lending are too low, then bubbles will eventually form, causing bad things to happen).