Amazon has secured an $8 billion loan in anticipation of market headwinds.

Provided by DBS Bank, Mizuho Bank and others, the loan — which will mature in 364 days (January 3, 2024), with an option to extend for another 364 days — will be used for “general corporate purposes,” Amazon said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that the loan adds to the range of financing options the company has tapped in recent months to hedge against the “uncertain macroeconomic environment.”

“Like all companies we regularly evaluate our operating plan and make financing decisions — like entering into term loan agreements or issuing bonds — accordingly,” the spokesperson said via email. “Given the uncertain macroeconomic environment, over the last few months we have used different financing options to support capital expenditures, debt repayments, acquisitions and working capital needs.”

Amazon’s income dipped toward the end of 2022 as the economy took its toll. The tech giant spent billions doubling the size of its fulfillment network during the pandemic, a play that served it well initially but which proved to be short sighted.

Amazon was forced to shut down or delay plans for over a dozen facilities as e-commerce sales last year grew slower than expected. Another headwind — soaring energy prices — impacted Amazon’s business in a major way, with the company’s spending on shipping climbing 10% to $19.9 billion in Q3 2022.

To cut costs, Amazon plans to reduce its workforce in early 2023, reportedly by as much as 10,000 employees. The layoffs, which would be the largest in the company’s history, are said to be concentrated in Amazon’s human resources, Alexa and retail divisions.

In other penny-saving measures, Amazon has frozen hiring for corporate roles in its retail business, shut down its Amazon Care telehealth service, closed all but one of its U.S. call centers, and scaled back Amazon Scout, its long-running delivery robot project. Those moves haven’t been enough to prevent the company’s market cap from falling below $1 trillion for the first time since April 2020.

Amazon had about $35 billion in cash and cash equivalents and long-term debt of about $59 billion at the end of the third quarter ended September 30, Reuters reports. For the first nine months of 2022, Amazon paid $932 million in cash paid of interest on debt, up from $731 million for the same period a year earlier; the interest rate spread on the new $8 billion will start at 0.75% before increasing to 1.05% if Amazon decides to extend the loan’s maturity.


https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/03/amazon-secures-8b-loan-anticipating-market-headwinds/

In New Orleans, you can drink alcohol openly in the streets. You can even throw your own parade. But to access porn on the internet, you now need to present proof of government-issued ID, as a new law goes into effect.

Louisiana state House Bill 142 requires adult sites to screen visitors via “reasonable age verification,” or face possible legal consequences. And the law, signed all the way back in June and effective as of January 1, 2023, defines “reasonable age verification” rather narrowly. Gone are the days of the “agree that you’re 18+ box,” or the “input your birth year” drop down menu in the Bayou State.

Instead, under the law, porn publishing websites can either demand that users present a digitized ID card based on a form of government ID, or simply show their government-issued ID. A vague, third option also allows companies to use “any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of the person.” So, in theory, porn sites (or third-party services) could mine users’ credit card, insurance, employment, bank, or other financial information to find verifiable proof of age— which some already do. But for the most part, adult sites will probably stick to driver’s licenses.

Louisiana allows digital driver’s licenses through the state’s LA Wallet initiative and app. It’s via that LA Wallet system that popular porn sites like Pornhub, Youporn, and Redtube appear to be newly verifying user ages. At Allpasstrust.com, users can connect their LA Wallet to accounts on all three platforms. And a link on the adult sites directs to that same page, as demonstrated in this tweet from a Louisiana-based lawyer.

Gizmodo reached out to Pornhub, Youporn, and Redtube with questions about the new policy, and did not immediately receive a response. It’s currently unclear if or how those without Louisiana drivers licenses can readily access online pornography in the state.

A platform is considered a porn publisher and subject to the new restrictions if at least one-third of the content on its website meets the bill’s extensive definition of “material harmful to minors,” which lists specific types of sexual or vulgar acts, including “fondling of...anuses,” and “excretory functions.” If sites fail to comply with the new ID-requirements, the company could be held liable for distributing harmful material to minors and face fines.

The logic behind the legislation is that porn is corrupting the youth. “Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors,” the bill text reads. And, though some research suggests that early exposure to pornography can have negative mental health impacts on children and teens, past attempts to censor minors’ access to adult content online have notably failed. Internet savvy young people have a multitude of ways to get around content filters and parental blocks. Louisiana’s latest effort will likely be no different. After all, a simple VPN can bypass the new age verification restrictions.

However, officially identifying oneself to view pornography could have serious consequences for adults, should there be a security breach. HB142 decrees that the companies or third-parties performing the age verification “shall not retain any identifying information...after access has been granted.” Pornhub states on its website that it doesn’t collect any data during the process, and “your proof of age does not allow anyone to trace your online activity.” Yet it’s hard to imagine a foolproof system that both verifies someone’s exact age and somehow doesn’t lead to increased privacy risk.

State-run systems are frequently vulnerable to digital attacks. And third-party systems like password managers and login verification services have recently been targets of some major hacks.

Nonetheless, Louisiana isn’t the only place to introduce official age verification requirements for adult content on the internet. France’s parliament passed similar legislation in 2020. And back in 2019, another age verification law was proposed in the United Kingdom (but ultimately scrapped amid privacy concerns.)

In the U.S., Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced the federally-focused SCREEN Act last month, which would require age verification for online adult content nationwide if passed, along with another bill intended to diminish porn’s First Amendment protections.



https://news.yahoo.com/louisiana-begins-requiring-government-id-201000430.html

Reading higher than official growth target of 6.0%-6.5%

HANOI (Reuters) -- Vietnam's gross domestic product grew 8.02% in 2022, the fastest pace annually since 1997, backed by strong domestic retail sales and exports.

The reading is higher than an official growth target of 6.0%-6.5% and growth last year of just 2.58%, when COVID lockdowns left a dent on the economy and impacted factory activity.

The high annual growth number comes despite fears of a global recession and its impact on demand for exports from Vietnam, a key manufacturer of goods like textiles, footwear and electronics for big-name international brands.

"The economic performance is worth noting amid global economic and political uncertainty and challenges," the General Statistics Office (GSO) said in a report.

GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 5.92%, slowing from an expansion of 13.71% in the third quarter, the GSO said.

Exports in 2022 were up 10.6% to $371.85 billion, while retail sales rose 19.8%, the GSO said.

Consumer prices in December rose 4.55% from a year earlier, it added.


https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Vietnam-GDP-grows-8.02-in-2022-fastest-expansion-in-25-years

In my experience, a lot of rich people are living in anxiety and fear. Before they got rich, all efforts and endeavours were taken most of their life and time but after they reached where they are now, insecurity and anxiety take control of their life. Have you ever thought about this ? Please share your thoughts.

The project aims to scan all the world’s eyeballs

IN A COLLEGE classroom in the Indian city of Bangalore last August, Moiz Ahmed held up a volleyball-size chrome globe with a glass-covered opening at its center. Ahmed explained to the students that if they had their irises scanned with the device, known as the Orb, they would be rewarded with 25 Worldcoins, a soon-to-be released cryptocurrency. The scan, he said, was to make sure they hadn’t signed up before. That’s because Worldcoin, the company behind the project, wants to create the most widely and evenly distributed cryptocurrency ever by giving every person on the planet the same small allocation of coins.

Some listeners were enthusiastic, considering the meteoric rise in value that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin since they launched. “I found it to be a very unique opportunity,” said Diksha Rustagi. “You can probably earn a lot from Worldcoin in the future.” Others were more cautious, including a woman who goes by Chaitra R, who hung at the back of the classroom as her fellow students signed up. “I have a lot of doubts,” she said. “We would like to know how it’s going to help us.”

Those doubts may be warranted. The 5-minute pitch from Ahmed, a contractor hired to recruit users, focused on Worldcoin’s potential as a digital currency, but the project’s goals have morphed considerably since its inception. Over the past year, the company has developed a system for third parties to leverage its massive registry of “unique humans” for a host of identity-focused applications.

Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania says the company’s technology could solve one of the Web’s thorniest problems—how to prevent fake identities from distorting online activity, without compromising people’s privacy. Potential applications include tackling fake profiles on social media, distributing a global universal basic income (UBI), and empowering new forms of digital democracy.

But Worldcoin’s biometric-centered approach is facing considerable pushback. The nature of its technology and the lack of clarity about how it will be used are fueling concerns around privacy, security, and transparency. Questions are also being raised over whether Worldcoin’s products can live up to its ambitious goals.

So far, Worldcoin has signed up more than 700,000 users in some 25 countries, including Chile, France, and Kenya. In 2023 it plans to fully launch the project and hopes to scale up its user base rapidly. Many people will be watching the company during this make-or-break year to see how these events will unfold. Will Worldcoin succeed in reimagining digital identity, or will it collapse, like so many buzzy cryptocurrencies that have come before?

Where the Worldcoin idea came from

In early 2020, Blania started working with Worldcoin cofounders Sam Altman, former president of the legendary Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and Max Novendstern, who previously worked at the financial-technology company Wave. The question driving them was a simple one, Blania says. What would happen if they gave every person on the planet an equal share of a new cryptocurrency?

Their thesis was that the network effects would make the coin far more useful than previous cryptocurrencies—the more people who hold it, the easier it would be to send and receive payments with it. It could also boost financial inclusion for millions around the world without access to traditional banking, says Blania. And, if the coins increase in value (as have other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum), that trend could help redistribute global wealth.

Most ambitiously, the founders envisaged Worldcoin as a global distribution network for UBI—a radical approach to social welfare in which every citizen receives regular cash payments to cover their basic needs. The idea has become popular in Silicon Valley as an antidote to the job-destroying effects of automation, and it has been tried out in locations including California, Finland, and Kenya. When the Worldcoin project was unveiled in October 2021, Altman told Wired that the coin could one day be used to fairly distribute the enormous profits generated by advanced artificial intelligence systems.

To ensure even distribution of coins, Worldcoin needed a sign-up process that guaranteed that each person could register only once. Blania says the team didn’t want to tie the cryptocurrency to government IDs due to privacy risks, and they eventually decided that only biometric iris scans could scale into the billions. Given the sensitivity of biometric data, the team knew that privacy protections had to be paramount. Their solution is a protocol based on Proof-of-Personhood (PoP)—a complex combination of custom hardware, machine learning, cryptography, and blockchain technology that Blania says can assign everyone a unique digital identity with complete anonymity.

The Orb is central to this approach. Behind its gleaming surface is a custom optical system that captures high-definition iris scans. To sign up for Worldcoin, enrollees download the company’s app onto their smartphones, where it creates a pair of linked cryptographic keys: a shareable public key and a private key that remains hidden on the user’s device. The public key is used to generate a QR code that the Orb reads before scanning users’ irises. The company says it has invested considerable effort into making Orbs resistant to spoofing sign-ups with modified or fake irises.

The scan is then converted into a string of numbers known as a hash via a one-way function, which makes it nearly impossible to re-create the image even if the hash is compromised. The Orb sends the iris hash and a hash of the user’s public key to Worldcoin’s servers in a signed message. The system checks the iris hash against a database to see if the person has signed up before, and if not, it’s added to the list. The public-key hash is added to a registry on the company’s blockchain.

The process for claiming the user’s free Worldcoins relies on a cryptographic technique known as a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), which lets a user prove knowledge of a secret without revealing it. The app’s wallet uses an open-source protocol to generate a ZKP showing that the holder’s private key is linked to a public-key hash on the blockchain, without revealing which one. That way, Worldcoin won’t know which public key is associated with which wallet address. Once this linkage is verified by the company’s servers, the tokens are sent to the wallet. The ZKP also includes a string of numbers unique to each user called a nullifier, which shows if they’ve tried to claim their coins before without revealing their identity.

Worldcoin’s Web3 applications

It didn’t take long for Worldcoin to realize that its identity system could have broader applications. According to Blania, the first to spot the potential was Chris Dixon, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which led the first investment round in Worldcoin. Blania says that about seven months after the team started work on the project, he told them, “This is super interesting tech, but I think you don’t understand what a big deal it actually is.”

On today’s Internet, most activities flow through centralized platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and PayPal. Blockchain technology could theory remove these middlemen, instead using a decentralized networks of volunteers to regulate such functions as online payments, social media, ride-sharing platforms, and many other types of services—a vision for the future of the Internet dubbed Web3.

But decentralization also enables new kinds of manipulation, including sybil attacks, named after the 1973 book Sybil, about a woman with multiple personalities. The anonymity of the Internet means it’s easy to create multiple identities that let attackers gain disproportionate influence over decentralized networks. That’s why cryptocurrencies today require members to carry out complex mathematical puzzles or stake large chunks of their money if they want to contribute to core activities like verifying transactions. But that means control of these networks often boils down to how many high-powered computer chips you can afford or how much crypto you hold.



Worldcoin will manage two different processes: signing up users and letting them claim the promised amount of the cryptocurrency as a reward for signing up. Signing up involves scanning users’ irises and keeping records that connect those scans with their digital wallets. Claiming a reward requires verification that the user has indeed signed up, which can be done in a way that doesn’t reveal any information about the user other than that they are signed up.

A method to ensure that every member of a network has just one identity could solve the sybil problem in a much more equitable way. And a unique digital ID could have applications beyond Web3, says Tiago Sada, head of product at Worldcoin, such as preventing bot armies on social media, replacing credit-card or government-ID verification to access online services, or even facilitating democratic governance over the Web. Toward the end of last year, Sada says, Worldcoin started work on a new product called World ID—a software-development kit that lets third parties accept ZKPs of “unique humanness” from Worldcoin users.

“A widely adopted PoP changes the nature of the Internet completely,” says Sada. “Once you have sybil resistance, this idea of a unique person [on a blockchain], then it just gives you an order of magnitude more things you can do.”

Worldcoin’s pivot to World ID

Despite the startup’s growing focus on World ID, Blania insists its ambitions for the Worldcoin cryptocurrency haven’t diminished. “There is no token that has more than 100 million users,” he says. Worldcoin could have billions. “And really no one knows what the explosion of innovation will be if that actually happens.”

But the coin has yet to be released—those who sign up get an IOU, not actual cryptocurrency—and the company has released few details on how it will work. “They haven’t shared anything regarding what their currency model or their economic model is going to be,” says Anna Stone, who leads commercial strategy for a nonprofit called Good Dollar. “It’s just not yet clear how individual users will benefit.”

Good Dollar distributes small amounts of its own cryptocurrency to anyone who signs up, as a form of UBI. Stone says the project has focused on creating a sustainable stream of UBI for claimants, while Worldcoin seems to be committing far more resources to developing its PoP protocol than the currency itself. “Offering people free crypto is a powerful lead-generation tactic,” she says. “But getting people into your system and getting people using your currency as a currency are two quite different challenges.”

Leading UBI proponent Karl Widerquist, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University–Qatar, says he’s skeptical of the potential of cryptocurrencies for boosting financial inclusion or enabling UBI. He says their inherently volatile prices make them unsuitable as currency. But Worldcoin’s one-time distribution seems even less likely to succeed, he says, because most people around the world are so poor that they spend everything they have right away. “The majority of people in the world are going to have none of this currency very quickly.”

The company’s vision for Worldcoin has also shifted as the importance of World ID has grown. While the company can’t dictate what the token will be used for, Sven Seuken, Worldcoin’s head of economics, says it is now positioning the coin as a governance token that gives users a stake in a blockchain-based type of entity called a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The company has ambitions to slowly transfer governance of its protocol to a DAO that’s controlled by users, with voting rights linked to their Worldcoin holdings. Tokens would act less as a payment method and more like shares in a company that manages the World ID platform.

This pivot wasn’t reflected in the pitch at the college in Bangalore, where enrollees were sold on the potential of a fast, cheap way to transfer money around the world. Seuken admits the company needs to update its public communications around the benefits of signing up, but he says explaining World ID’s value at this stage of adoption is challenging. “Convincing users initially to sign up by pitching World ID, this would be a really hard sell,” he says.

The risks of Worldcoin’s biometric data

Informed consent is important, though, says Jon Callas, director of public-interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s problematic, he says, if users don’t realize they’re signing up for a global identity system, especially one that involves biometrics, which are a uniquely sensitive form of authentication. “It’s really hard to revoke and reissue your iris,” says Callas.

While ZKPs provide strong mathematical guarantees of privacy, implementation mistakes can leave gaps that attackers can exploit, says Martin Albrecht, a professor of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2020, researchers bypassed ZKPs that had been used to anonymize transactions in the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash by exploiting their knowledge that the time taken to generate a proof correlated to the content of transaction data (specifically, the transaction amount).

Worldcoin’s head of blockchain, Remco Bloemen, says that even if the company’s ZKPs were cracked, there wouldn’t be a leak of biometric information, as the ZPKs aren’t connected to users’ iris hashes and are based only on their private keys. But Albrecht says revealing a user’s private key is still a significant problem as it would let you impersonate them. “Once you know someone’s private key, it’s game over,” he says.

Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research, says that worries about Worldcoin’s threats to privacy are overblown, given that the biometrics aren’t linked to anything. But Worldcoin’s stringent privacy protections have introduced a critical weakness, he adds. Because biometric authentication is a one-time process, there is no ongoing link between users and their World IDs. “You’ve just found a way to generate a key, and that key can be sold or disposed of in any way people want,” he says. “They have no framework, in any sense, for making sure these wallets are tied to the people who received them, other than their trust relationship with the people that they’ve hired to do the recruiting.”

Without an ongoing link between World ID and the underlying biometrics, it’s impossible to audit the registry of users, says Santiago Siri, board member of a competing digital identity system called Proof of Humanity (PoH). That’s why PoH has built its registry of unique humans by getting people to upload videos of themselves that others can challenge if the videos seem fake. Siri concedes that the approach is hard to scale and has significant privacy challenges, but he says the ability to audit a system is critical for its trustworthiness. “How can I verify that of those 750,000 [Worldcoin] identities, 700,000 are not fake, or controlled by Andreessen Horowitz?” he says. “No one will be able to verify that, not even the Worldcoin people.”

It’s also questionable how useful the concept of “unique humanness” really is outside of niche cryptocentric applications, says Kaliya Young, an identity researcher and activist. Identity plays a broader role in everyday life, she says: “I care what your university degrees are, where you were born, how much money you make, all sorts of attributes that PoP doesn’t solve for.”

Worldcoin’s biggest challenge may not be the functionality of its technology but questions of trust. The central goal of blockchains is to avoid relying on centralized authorities, but by using complex, custom hardware to recruit users, the company is setting itself up as a powerful arbiter of digital identity. “Worldcoin posits that everyone in the world should have their eyeball scanned by them and they should be the decider of who’s a unique human,” says Young. “Please explain to me how that’s not ultracentralized.”

What’s more, Microsoft’s Weyl says, the company’s reliance on the “creepy all-seeing eye” of the Orb may create problematic associations. According to Weyl, projects like Worldcoin may give people “a sense of a dystopian future” rather than one that is “hopeful and inclusive.”

In the end, the success of Worldcoin’s ambitious 2023 goals may boil down to a question of narrative. The company is peddling a message of financial inclusion and wealth distribution while critics raise concerns around privacy and transparency. It remains to be seen whether the world will truly buy into Worldcoin.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/worldcoin

by doing calculations with economic experts they have disvored next prices.

If you live in generally canada you should earn at least 3500 in order to function normally.
Euro zone it's about 3500 EUR
In USA it's varied but If you live in los Angeles or new York it's a 7000$ + for sure
In UK London is more expensive but its about 4000 + for sure.

The goverment should restrict prices of rent

Planned economy

A planned economy is a type of economic system where the distribution of goods and services or the investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economic plans that are either economy-wide or limited to a category of goods and services. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, participatory or Soviet-type forms of economic planning.[1][2] The level of centralization or decentralization in decision-making and participation depends on the specific type of planning mechanism employed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

Despite reams of misinformation found online, Ford dispels it all by sharing the truth about its EVs.

You're probably well aware by now that electric vehicles are much safer for your health and the environment than their gas-powered counterparts. However, there are still many people and organizations working to make us believe that's not true, and many automakers were actually on the list of misinformation peddlers over the years. Now, Ford has come forward to tell it how it really is.

EVs don't produce any tailpipe emissions. This means there's no smelly and dangerous exhaust. While the vehicles do create more emissions than gas cars during their production, it's quickly offset by the lack of emissions during use.

While most EV owners are aware that their cars help the environment, they may be much more excited about the fuel savings. Saving the environment is virtuous, but saving money provides more tangible and immediate rewards.

At any rate, according to a recent article published by Electrek, Ford reveals how much money an owner of one of its EVs can save over the life of the vehicle by choosing it over a gas car. Ford also shows how much it will reduce CO2 emissions over the same period of time.

As part of its sustainable financing report, Ford says if you drive an electric car and use the US electrical grid to charge it, you can reduce C02 emissions by as much as 60 percent when compared to a similar ICE vehicle. The larger the vehicle, the greater the savings over time.

According to Electrek, based on Ford's findings, F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck owners can save more than $27.2K (8,777 gallons of gas) throughout the lifetime of the vehicle. This is based on current gas prices and compared to a similar gas-powered F-150. E-Transit owners can save $19.2K (6,189 gallons), and Mustang Mach-E owners can save nearly $15,000 and 5,000 gallons of gas.

Ford reported the C02 savings in metric tons as followed, according to Electrek:

F-150 Lightning: 78
Mustang Mach-E: 42
E-Transit: 55

Are you surprised by these numbers? Leave us your thought in the comment section below.

https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ford-reveals-how-much-evs-save-on-fuel-costs-and-reduce-emissions/ar-AA15zhHF

Volkswagen Settles Emissions-Cheating Cases For $14.7 Billion

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Volkswagen's $14.7 billion settlement announced Tuesday is the largest auto-related consumer class-action settlement in U.S. history, lawyers said.

Volkswagen on Tuesday agreed to settle consumer lawsuits and government allegations that it programmed cars with 2-liter diesel engines to cheat on emissions tests. VW admitted to installing software that turned on pollution controls during emissions testing then turned them off when the cars were on the road.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/volkswagen-emissions-cheating-scandal-settlement/

I don't think there is any method to acquire a valuable asset for free

I don't think it's really possible to get any kind of valuable and worthy assets for free unless you do something they ask you to do for them and your work is worth paying some assets because nothing comes for free unless you are the product which means even if they promise to give you free money or free asset the asset if actually no free buy it comes from the job they want you and doing this job sometimes doesn't worth it.

One thing for sure, crypto mining was not free and it will never be considering the increasing cost of electricity.

hydrogen you skipped one economy of the bulldozers

you mentioned scrap metal which is pointless economy when it comes to transport cost of said weight

however. selling PARTS to other miners is lucrative

BIS draws up framework to allow banks to hoard crypto in 2025

based on some sources. this means of the banks combined value of 180trillion(yep i was shocked too)
the banks can hoard upto ~$3.7trillion of crypto such as ethereum/btc

High fertilizer prices could put an additional 100 million people at risk of undernourishment, a study suggests.

The war in Ukraine has led to the blockade of millions of tons of wheat, barley and corn, but reduced food exports from the region are less of a driver of food price rises than feared, researchers say.

Instead, a modeling study led by University of Edinburgh researchers suggests surging energy and fertilizer prices will have by far the greatest impact on food security in coming decades.

Until now, how energy and fertilizer price rises and export restrictions affects future global food prices was poorly understood. There has also been little analysis to quantify the scale of harm that hikes in the price of food could have on human nutritional health and the environment.

The team used a global land-use computer model to simulate the effects of export restrictions and spikes in production costs on food prices, health and land use until 2040.

Their simulations suggest the combined effect of export restrictions, increased energy costs and mid-2022 fertilizer prices—which are three times higher than at the start of the previous year—could cause food costs to rise by 81% in 2023 compared to 2021 levels.

Export restrictions account for only a small fraction of the simulated price rises, the team says. Halting exports from Russian and Ukraine would increase food costs in 2023 by 2.6%, while spikes in energy and fertilizer prices would cause a 74% rise.

Food price rises would lead to many people's diets becoming poorer, the team says.

The findings suggest there could be up to one million additional deaths and more than 100 million people undernourished if high fertilizer prices continue. The greatest increases in deaths would be in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East.

The modeling estimates that sharp increases in the cost of fertilizers—which are key to producing high yields—would greatly reduce their use by farmers. Without fertilizers more agricultural land is needed to produce the world's food, the team says.

The simulations indicate that by 2030 this could increase agricultural land by an area the size of much of Western Europe—Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. This would have severe impacts on deforestation, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, the team says.

The study is published in the journal Nature Food. It also involved researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Rutgers University in the U.S. and the University of Aberdeen.

Dr. Peter Alexander, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the study, said, "This could be the end of an era of cheap food. While almost everyone will feel the effects of that on their weekly shop, it's the poorest people in society, who may already struggle to afford enough healthy food, who will be hit hardest.

"The Black Sea Grain Initiative is a welcome development and has largely allowed Ukraine food exports to be re-established, but the immediacy of these issues appears to have diverted attention away from the impact of fertilizer prices. While fertilizer prices are coming down from the peaks of earlier this year, they remain high and this may still feed through to continued high food price inflation in 2023. More needs to be done to break the link between higher food prices and harm to human health and the environment."


https://phys.org/news/2022-12-soaring-fertilizer-prices-millions-undernourished.html

What do you think and the possible effects if the United States defaults on its debts or its credit rating is downgraded?

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Mastercard to start providing competing payment networks with the information they need to process debit card payments. In a proposed enforcement action announced on Friday, the FTC said Mastercard had allegedly violated a provision of the Dodd-Frank act known as the Durbin Amendment by prohibiting merchants from routing transactions over alternative networks.

The action targets “tokenization,” the technology that underpins mobile payment applications like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. When you go to make a debit or credit card purchase with your phone’s mobile wallet, the software substitutes sensitive information, including the primary number associated with your account, with a separate set of single-use “tokens.” Mastercard and Visa say the practice prevents fraud since tokens contain no exploitable information when they’re in transit. It’s only when they arrive at Mastercard or Visa’s servers, and they’re mapped back to their original account holder, that they point to someone.

According to the FTC, Mastercard has historically stopped competing networks from accessing its token vault. That means whenever consumers decided to pay with a mobile wallet, merchants had to route the transactions over Mastercard (or Visa) and pay the company's transactions fees, which are typically higher than that of its competitors. The Durbin Amendment calls for banks to support two competing payment networks on all debit cards. It was a provision Congress introduced to promote competition among networks. The FTC didn’t say if it reached a similar agreement with Visa.

“While we are taking these steps to bring this matter to a close, there should be no question that tokenized transactions provide an increased level of protection to both consumers and merchants,” Mastercard spokesperson Seth Eisen told Bloomberg. “This focus on security guides our efforts in a highly competitive market and provides the incentive for us to continue investing in innovations that promote the peace of mind every person expects.” Eisen added Mastercard would “continue to work to update our processes to comply with the consent order and provide even greater choice.”

The FTC plans to collect comments from the public before voting to finalize the order against Mastercard.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/ftc-orders-mastercard-open-debit-transactions-competing-payment-networks-234358951.html

Just a year ago, Washington DC’s Hirshhorn art museum – the capital’s preeminent contemporary art museum – was asking whether non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were “fad or the future of art”. Twelve months on, it looks like “tax write-off” might have been the right answer.

This year was not just the year that cryptocurrency values were burned by investor fears, rising interest rates, inflation and scandals, it was the year that crypto’s cartoonish art cousin the NFT – an electronic identifier confirming a digital collectible is real – collided with reality.

In March 2021, Christie’s sold a digital collage NFT by the artist Beeple for nearly $70m (£58m). In January pop star Justin Bieber paid $1.29m (£1m) for a “Bored Ape” NFT, a graphic of a, well, bored ape. Everyone from Michael Jordan to former first lady Melania Trump was in on the game.

Now – alongside the broader crypto market – the appetite for NFTs is so diminished that a specialized market has sprung up for collectors looking to sell off their once-valuable “digital collectibles” as tax losses to offset their income tax bills.

A recently launched service, Unsellable, aims to help collectors do exactly that. Think of it as a distressed asset fire sale.

“While every investment class has its losers, many of the NFTs we invested in were not only down big; they were now totally worthless … illiquid … unsellable,” the service says on its website.

Unsellable – which says it is “building the world’s largest collection of worthless NFTs” – buys the underlying tokens for a fraction of their original price and provides an official receipt for tax purposes.

Launched a month ago, Unsellable now has 5,000 NFTs, and founder Skyler Hallgren expects that to grow to 15,000 by the end of the month. “They are an interesting artefact of a period of time in the market,” he said. But he expects the NFTs are “likely to continue to be worthless”.

“We realized there was a practical problem that was locking up a lot of resources and we could create a lot of value for people by offering to buy up their worthless NFTs and allow them to harvest the losses,” said Hallgren.

“For some folks, the amount they paid for NFTs is quite high and were buying them for a penny so the write-off they can take is quite high.”

It’s easy to see why buyers may be keen to sell for a fraction of their original investment. Demand for digital certificates of ownership that underlie NFTs has evaporated. More than $19bn (£16bn) was spent on NFTs between January and March 2022. Since then, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, monthly spending has dropped by 87%.

Just $442m (£368m) was spent in November, and the number of active NFT traders is down around two-thirds from its peak a year ago. According to the Nonfungible.com market tracker, 144,000 NFTs were sold for $142m (£118m) on 16 January 2022. This Wednesday, there were 17,000 sales for $28,000 (£23,294).

The most traded collection of NFTs are images from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), like the one Bieber bought. Each Bored Ape image features a unique combination of 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing and more. “All apes are dope, but some are rarer than others,” the company says.

Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape, was recently hit with a class-action lawsuit claiming it had unrealistically hyped the value of its intangible goods. The lawsuit named celebrities – and former NFT evangelists – including Bieber, Paris Hilton, Madonna, Jimmy Fallon and Kevin Hart, as co-defendants.

“Defendants’ promotional campaign was wildly successful, generating billions of dollars in sales and re-sales,” the lawsuit, filed on 8 December in a district court in California, said.

“The manufactured celebrity endorsements and misleading promotions regarding the launch of an entire BAYC ecosystem (the so-called Otherside metaverse) were able to artificially increase the interest in and price of the BAYC NFTs during the relevant period, causing investors to purchase these losing investments at drastically inflated prices.”

The NFT market is a long way from where it sat in October 2021, when Mike Winkelmann – the digital artist known as Beeple – sold his work at Christie’s, making him “among the top three most valuable living artists”.

Last week, Winkelmann remained upbeat about the internet’s place in creating art, but he conceded: “The market is a bit crap right now,” he told Bloomberg. “Do I think it’s going to go back to where it was? I don’t know … I definitely think it’s going to go up from here.”

And one former celebrity, and US president, agrees. Earlier this month, Donald Trump launched a collection of digital collectibles depicting him as, among other things, an astronaut, a cowboy and a superhero. It sold out in less than a day.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/29/unsellable-worthless-nfts-tax-write-off