Dec 1 (Reuters) - Victims of the Uvalde mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school in May have filed a $27 billion class-action lawsuit against an array of public entities and officials, seeking damages for ongoing trauma.

The suit filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas names the city of Uvalde, its police department, the school district, the state Department of Public Safety and several police and school officials, alleging they failed to follow protocols for an active shooter.

The May 24 tragedy rocked the United States as the slaughtered schoolchildren were aged 9 to 11 and police waited more than an hour, while some children called for help, before storming the classroom and killing the shooter.

It was the deadliest U.S. school shooting in almost a decade, and many children were wounded.

The class-action suit seeks damages for the survivors including parents whose children were killed and kids who witnessed the massacre, said attorney Charles Bonner, whose California law firm brought the suit. Anyone else in the "zone of danger" could join the suit, Bonner said.

"Parents were telling us that kids are threatening suicide, they're totally changed from what they were on May 23, the day before the incident," Bonner told reporters in Uvalde on Wednesday.

"One child is having the nightmare that she's having a heart attack. In fact two children. The parents are traumatized because they've seen this totally night-and-day change."

A spokesperson for the city of Uvalde said on Thursday the city had not been served with the lawsuit and would not comment on pending litigation.

Representatives for the Uvalde Police Department, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the Department of Public Safety and the former chief of the school district's police force did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bonner said he was working with the gun violence prevention advocates Everytown in conjunction with a separate suit that Everytown filed on Monday against many of the same defendants plus Daniel Defense, the maker of the AR-15-style firearm used by the 18-year-old shooter.

Daniel Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Separately, the city of Uvalde on Thursday sued District Attorney Christina Mitchell for not handing over investigative materials related to the shooting. The city is asking a state judge to compel Mitchell's office to hand over records from all law enforcement agencies.

The district attorney's office said it had no comment on the lawsuit.


https://www.reuters.com/legal/uvalde-shooting-victims-file-27-billion-class-action-suit-2022-12-01/

• Over time, cars have become more expensive — but also more durable.
• The average age of a car on U.S. roads rose to a record 12.2 years in 2022.
• Here are the models with the greatest potential lifespan: The top two are Toyota SUVs, with the Sequoia and Land Cruiser both able to last nearly 300,000 miles.

New cars are getting increasingly expensive. But they’re also more durable than before, which means drivers have a better chance of getting their money’s worth.

As the average transaction price for new cars reached an estimated $45,872 in November — the highest on record, according to a joint forecast from J.D. Power and LMC Automotive — the average age of cars on the road also hit an all-time high of 12.2 years in 2022, a separate report by IHS Markit found.

The average age had been just over 11 years a decade ago. In 2002, it was 9.6 years.

Advancements in everything from materials to technology have helped, according to Will Kaufman, news editor at Edmunds, “and it doesn’t hurt that today’s vehicles have better ways to alert owners when there are maintenance issues.”

10 cars with the greatest potential lifespan

Among the models with the greatest potential lifespan, Toyota Sequoia topped the list, with the ability to travel nearly 300,000 miles, followed by the Land Cruiser, according to a recent iSeeCars study, which analyzed more than 2 million cars over the past 20 years to see which vehicles could last the longest.

Overall, SUVs and trucks are the most common vehicle types to rank in the top 10, while more fuel-efficient passenger cars, including the Prius and Avalon, earned two spots on the list.



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/mG3gNSQ/cars-greatest-lifespan.jpg

“Shoppers really, really value reliability, and automakers are definitely sensitive to how big an impact a reputation for reliability — or unreliability — can have on their brand,” Kaufman said.

Six of the top 10 were Toyota SUVs, trucks or cars. Other contenders in the top five include the Chevrolet Suburban and GMC Yukon, both three-row SUVs.

Every car and truck on the list can reach nearly a quarter-million miles or more, the report found.

As a general rule of thumb, most drivers consider the 200,000-mile mark the upper limit of a car’s lifespan, although some models clearly have the potential to travel much farther.

A limited supply of new cars and trucks due to the ongoing chip shortage has pushed consumers to use their existing vehicles for longer, according to IHS Markit, which tracks vehicle registrations in every state.

At the same time, millions of people who previously commuted to their jobs put fewer miles on their cars while they worked from home, further extending the life of their vehicles.


https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/04/these-10-cars-have-the-greatest-potential-lifespan.html

Even If india Iran russia belarus china will go all against NATO still NATO are stronger NATO got numbers.

Feelings of being overworked and underpaid prompted Rachel James, 29, and her partner to leave their jobs as doctors in the NHS to move to Australia. Two years later, the couple have no plans of returning.

“The pay is between double and triple what we would get in the UK,” Rachel (not her real name) says. She lives in Cooktown, a coastal town a four-hour drive north of Cairns. They enjoy free accommodation because the Australian health service offers incentives to people to work in rural areas.

The biggest difference is in the quality of life. Unlike in the British health service, the couple’s work rotas (rosters) are linked so they can have days off together.

“In the UK, when I was working as a doctor I struggled a lot in my foundation years with anxiety. I did mindfulness. I did exercise. I saw my GP. Nothing has ever done more for my mental health than having money left over in my bank account at the end of the month and being able to spend time with my partner,” she says.

Rachel and her partner are among thousands of UK medical graduates who leave to go abroad every year. While this type of brain drain has typically been limited to specific occupations, life in the UK is about to get tougher for young people across the board.

Real incomes are falling, taxes are rising and buying a home or starting a family is getting increasingly unaffordable. Scores of highly skilled workers – many of whom are already working remotely – may soon wonder whether they too would be better off somewhere else.

The political and economic turmoil of the past months has filled newspaper columns with comparisons of the UK and Italy.

The Economist magazine controversially ran a front page saying “Welcome to Britaly” with short-lived prime minister Liz Truss pictured as a British-Italian mash-up of the Statue of Liberty. The magazine said that both countries shared “terminable political drama, economic stagnation and nervous bond markets”.

But one feature of countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece, whose economies were badly wounded after the financial crisis, is just how many of their young can be found in Britain and elsewhere. The number of Italians and Spaniards in the UK more than trebled (tripled?) in the decade or so after the financial crisis, while Greeks more than doubled.

The UK is expected to suffer the highest inflation and the deepest recession among the G7 countries, according to the OECD. Real incomes are predicted to fall by a record 7pc (percent) over the next two years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. Pensioners will however not feel the same hit, as the Government has decided to honour the triple lock and uprate state pensions in line with double-digit inflation.

In many ways, life in Britain will likely get more difficult. Working people will have to pay higher taxes to fund services for a growing elderly population, as the labour force is shrinking. But young people were already dealt a bad hand, with low growth and high house prices putting milestones such as owning a home and starting a family out of reach.

But will it get bad enough to send Britain’s best and brightest abroad in search of a better life?

A mass exodus

The answer is not straightforward – and there’s little consensus among experts. In certain industries, the UK is already experiencing a brain drain. Some analysts say that global labour shortages and the rise of remote working mean that this phenomenon could spread more widely among highly skilled workers.

The trend has so far been most pronounced in healthcare, which is known to have a highly mobile workforce. Falling real pay and worse working conditions than in other wealthy countries mean it has been an issue for several years, according to experts.

Figures from the General Medical Council show that nearly 10,000 doctors left the UK medical workforce last year. Previous analysis indicates that around half plan to move overseas, the GMC said.

“Brain drain is a nice term but it's more than that. It's an exodus, a mass exodus of not just doctors but healthcare professionals,” says Dr Latifa Patel, representative body chair of the British Medical Association and a junior doctor herself.

“If you put it in the context of what we're lacking in the NHS at the moment, it's even more worrying. NHS England alone has 132,000 unfilled vacancies. Between 10 and 15,000 of those are doctors,” she says.

According to Patel, doctors typically emigrate to other English-speaking countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. Their pay has fallen by 30pc in real terms since the financial crisis, she says.

It’s not just about money though, she says. The workload and quality of life are possibly even more important. This is echoed by Rachel James’ experience who left for Australia.

“If I had thought [the NHS] would change in any reasonable time frame, we wouldn’t have made the decision to be here,” she says.

There is a lot of research on immigrants to the UK but what do we know about the ones who leave? “Not a huge amount to be honest,” says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory.

“We don't know that much about who they are or what they're doing when they're overseas. We have some figures from the US and Australian visa data, for example, showing that a fair number go to other English-speaking countries,” she says.

The image of UK emigration mainly being made up of retirees swapping Manchester for Mallorca is incorrect, according to Sumption. It’s much more likely to be young people with few responsibilities and ties going elsewhere. While there are some visa schemes for unskilled labour, many leaving are likely to be highly skilled to qualify for immigration rights.

Overseas opportunities

UK emigres (expats?) show up in immigration data in other countries but research on them is sparse and little is known about their overall skill level. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that some 90,000 Brits left the country in the year ending in June 2022. There is no information about how many of them leave for job opportunities.

Separate data going back to the start of the 90s shows that every year more Britons leave than come back. Figures from the last three months of 2019 – meaning the latest available data not potentially distorted by pandemic trends – shows that 138,000 UK nationals left while 78,000 arrived. This is common according to Sumption – most countries see a net outward flow of their own citizens.

The UK experienced a period of almost continuous net emigration between 1964 and 1983. But rising flows of arrivals from other countries mean the UK has since benefitted from brain gain rather than drain. The limited data means that it’s difficult to know how many highly skilled workers leave.

Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, says in his experience the flight of young people abroad has not yet become a big trend but warns that working from home has made many more conscious of overseas opportunities.

“The nature of the labour market has become much more global post-pandemic,” he says, “because when everybody was locked down it didn't matter if you were in Manchester or Malaga – it was still possible to do many jobs from anywhere.

“So I do think it's really important to remember… that the world is not going to wait for Britain to sort itself out. The UK has great strengths but we need to be aware that skills shortages are a global issue and other countries are looking at our talent as well.”

This has been the case for freelance designer Elise, who decided to pack up her life in London this summer to move to Lisbon. At the age of 32, felt she was done with living in shared flats but couldn’t afford other options. Despite having a successful career, homeownership was still firmly out of reach.

“I have come to terms with the fact that I don't feel like I've ever really be able to buy my own house. I'm also at a point where I don't really want to do like shared living anymore and rent is going up. So I felt like I might as well move somewhere else,” Elise, who prefers not to use her full name, says.  

After testing it out for a few months, she is now back in the UK while waiting for a two-year visa so she can move permanently. She was already working remotely in the UK.

“There's no time difference so I didn’t have to tell my clients or change anything about the way I worked. I can just transport it over there quite smoothly. Obviously with the visa comes a whole other kind of tax that I need to look into as I'll be living there. But from what I've heard, it's fairly straightforward,” she says.

During her first months in Lisbon, she was staying in co-living spaces where digital nomads like her have access to a workspace and can socialise together.

“It’s really great because you just meet lots of people who are doing the exact same thing. Everyone was pretty much around the same age group. It was a good way to meet people and feel a little bit of a sense of community with it,” she says.

Sluggish growth

Experts disagree on how likely the UK is to suffer a brain drain of highly skilled workers. Many say people tempted to leave face too many obstacles for a large-scale exodus to happen.

“If you want to go let's say to another English-speaking country, the US or Canada or Australia, you have to get a visa. You can't just say oh, I'd like to move. You'd have to get a job offer, for example. Those are quite considerable barriers,” says Alan Manning, an economist specialising in migration.

While the UK is expected to experience a deeper recession than its peers, vacancies are still near record levels. Research on emigration is sparse, but a report by the Home Office from 2012 found that there is an “inverse association” between British emigration and unemployment.

“In general, as UK unemployment falls, more British people emigrate and when unemployment in the UK is high, fewer British people emigrate,” it says. The report’s authors suggested that while it might sound counterintuitive it was because employed people have more resources to move abroad.

This is particularly pertinent for this downturn, which is characterised by a highly unusual combination of labour shortages and recession. Many other wealthy countries are also experiencing worker shortages. This means that people in the UK are in a better position to leave than during previous recessions. This will particularly benefit people with good skills. Brexit has made it more difficult to emigrate without a job offer or a particular skill set.

“I think there are two conflicting things. One is the economic fundamentals of the UK as a place to be a highly skilled worker are very strong. So particularly in London, but also Manchester and Birmingham,” says Adam Hawksbee, director of centre-right think tank Onward. On the other hand, he says, the failure to build more houses and lab space around cities means many workers and entrepreneurs are priced out.

“We need to see more from the Government on what their offer is to young people and young families. Because unless they're very clear that they want them to stay in the UK to engage in the workforce, they'll be looking elsewhere for other countries which are much more positive about the contribution they can provide.”

The UK’s weak productivity and sluggish growth mean young people have enjoyed much less prosperity than their parents did at the same age. From the mid-1950s until before the financial crisis, real incomes grew by 2pc a year on average. The recession is expected to cause a 7pc fall over the next two years, effectively wiping out 10 years of growth and bringing incomes back to 2013 levels. If the forecasts are correct, incomes will only have grown by 0.5pc annually in the two decades to 2028.  

“Pay progression among cohorts has stalled for those born after 1980. So each five-year birth cohort before 1980 earned more than the cohort that came before them. There's not been very much pay progression at all for those born after 1980, which are the millennials,” says Molly Broome, an economist at the Resolution Foundation.

The stagnation in incomes and growth has not been reflected in house prices. As successive governments have failed to ensure enough homes were built and central banks have inflated asset prices through quantitative easing, prices have soared.

Close to half of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their own home in the late 1970s to early 1990s. Today this figure has dropped below 30pc. This does not reflect a change in preference: around 80pc of young renters say they want to own a home, a figure which has remained stable over many years. First-time buyers today face property prices 5.9 times their annual salary, Nationwide data shows. This is up from 2.7 in 1983. In London, the ratio is even higher at 9.6, rising from 3.7.

Punishing tax burden

Liz Truss’ fateful mini-Budget also pulled the housing ladder further out of reach for many young people, after mortgage rates soared. As a result, thousands of people have been locked into renting for longer, while demand was already well above last year's levels in every region and country of Great Britain. Rents for new tenancies are at record highs, increasing 16pc in London in the year to October and 3.2pc in the rest of the country, Rightmove data shows.

“The base of voters [for the Conservative Party] is elderly homeowners who have very few incentives to be compassionate to the young wanting new homes built near them. This is extra central for the Tories. If they don't create homeowners there isn't really much of a party left,” says Robert Colvile, the director of right-leaning think tank CPS.

While he believes that the UK still has a lot to offer highly skilled workers, Colvile worries that over time highly skilled young people will be tempted to look elsewhere if things don’t improve.

“Longer term there is obviously a danger that the harder it gets to afford a home, the higher your marginal tax rates get, the more expensive childcare becomes and the more people will vote with their feet. I mean, people respond to incentives,” he says.

Parents in the UK also face the third highest childcare costs relative to their income among rich countries. There’s little hope of respite, as services are expected to face a near double-digit real terms cut over the next few years.

“Every marginal pound that the government spends seems to go towards supporting old people. The base of tax-paying younger workers who are having to pay for this whole thing is getting squeezed and squeezed,” Colvile says.

The measures announced by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in the Autumn Statement mean the UK will have the highest tax burden since the Second World War.

Bloomberg analysis has found that the marginal tax rate – meaning how much you get taxed for every extra pound you earn – is 42pc for people earning over £50,270 and 62pc for those earning over £100,000.

Having to pay more to the public coffers makes life in the UK less attractive according to David Smith, 33, who works in financial services. He moved to Hong Kong in 2018 with his company. He planned to stay for two years – it has now been four and a half, although he will soon have to come home because of family ties.

Including bonuses, David earns £90,000 a year. In Britain, he would pay 40pc tax. In Hong Kong, the top rate is 17pc.

“To me, it feels like if you work hard in the UK and earn a good salary you are punished with extortionate taxes which makes earning over £50,000 a year pointless. I'd rather work fewer days a week and keep under £50,000 salary in the UK,” David says.

In Hong Kong, he has been able to save £40,000 every year. He is also able to take his pension as a lump sum there. From his stint abroad, David will be coming back to Britain with a £340,000 savings pot to spend on his first home.

“The higher taxes you pay in the UK are extortionate. I grew up around Blackpool stacking shelves on minimum wage and then I have moved up the salary brackets. In Hong Kong, I can literally put away £40,000 a year because of the low taxes.”

Growing unease

All of these things – rising taxes, falling living standards and the unaffordability of buying a home or starting a family – are ammunition for the Labour Party, which is closer than at any point in the past 12 years to getting back in power.

Keir Starmer has said he will fight the next election on “economic competence” and wants to bring down taxes for working people.

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves also took every opportunity to tear into Jeremy Hunt’s tax grab when delivering her speech after the Autumn Statement.

“The prospect of home ownership becoming more and more remote. And rents going through the roof,” she said.

“This Government has presided over the biggest wage squeeze in centuries. This was a crisis made in Downing Street, and it is working people paying the price,” she said.

There is growing unease on the Conservative backbenches too that the party is alienating young people, with several MPs speaking out against the triple lock and rigid planning laws.

But it will take considerable improvement to convince those highly skilled workers, who have already had a taste of life elsewhere, to return.

Rachel, the doctor who left for Australia, says the British system has “got it completely wrong”.

“I know older people are struggling as well. I totally understand the need to improve living standards for older people. But in some areas, and certainly in terms of the NHS, those policies do come at the cost of people who are early on in their careers,” she says.

“Here, there are opportunities because there is so much more room for growth. You see it everywhere, you see building and construction all of the time, new roads are getting tarmacked. In the UK there is no room for growth. It felt like there was nothing for us in the UK in terms of a future.”

Unless things change fast, others may be quick to follow.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/high-taxes-and-e2-80-98no-future-e2-80-99-spark-fears-of-mass-exodus-of-young-britons/ar-AA14B8h8

(Bloomberg) -- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will offer advanced 4-nanometer chips when its new $12 billion plant in Arizona opens in 2024, an upgrade from its previous public statements, after US customers such as Apple Inc. pushed the company to do so, according to people familiar with the matter.

TSMC is expected to announce the new plan when President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visit Phoenix for a ceremony next Tuesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

The TSMC factory had been slated to make 5-nanometer semiconductors, a standard that will be far from the cutting edge by 2024. The Taiwanese company also will commit to adding a second nearby plant, which will make even more advanced, 3-nanometer chips, they said.

TSMC previously said it would make 20,000 wafers per month at the Arizona facility, although production may increase from those original plans, the people said. Apple will use about a third of the output as production gets underway.

Apple and other major tech companies rely on TSMC for their chipmaking needs, and the change means they’ll be able to get more of their processors from the US. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has previously told employees that his company plans to source chips from the Arizona plant. He’s scheduled to attend the event next week, the people said.

A representative for TSMC declined to comment. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Supply-chain disruptions and trade tensions with China have fueled efforts to bring more manufacturing to the US and Europe. US lawmakers also passed the Chips and Science Act this year, offering $50 billion in incentives for companies looking to create semiconductors in the country. TSMC is likely to receive billions in subsidies.

The possibility of China taking over Taiwan also has sparked concerns about relying on that region for so much of the semiconductor industry’s current supply. TSMC, headquartered on the island, is the world’s go-to supplier for chips powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. Most of its production is still centralized in Taiwan.

In addition to Apple, TSMC customers like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Nvidia Corp. have asked the Taiwanese company to make more sophisticated chips at the Arizona plant, according to people familiar with the discussions.

AMD CEO Lisa Su and Nvidia head Jensen Huang are expected to attend the event. Representatives for AMD and Nvidia declined to comment.

TSMC’s customers have asked the company to roll out its latest technologies simultaneously in the US and Taiwan, the people said, which would help fulfill a Biden administration goal of having the most cutting-edge chips in the world produced on US soil. But TSMC has not committed to that approach, and Taiwanese and company officials have said that they intend to keep the latest technology at home.



https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-plans-more-advanced-chips-051012014.html

16 major domestic airports are testing facial recognition tech to verify IDs — and it could go nationwide in 2023

Next time you’re at airport security, get ready to look straight into a camera. The TSA wants to analyze your face.

The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles — and hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year. Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers’ IDs to make sure they’re not impostors.

The TSA says facial recognition, which has been banned by cities such as San Francisco, helps improve security and possibly also efficiency. But it’s also bringing an unproven tech, with civil rights ramifications we still just don’t understand, to one of the most stressful parts of travel.

After hearing concerns from Washington Post readers who encountered face scans while traveling, I wanted to know how the TSA is using the tech and what our rights are. Everybody wants better safety, but is this really safer — and what are its real costs?

So I quizzed the TSA’s Jason Lim, who helps run the program formally known as Credential Authentication Technology with Camera (CAT-2). And I also called Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, and one of the biggest critics of facial recognition.

I learned the TSA has put some important constraints on its use of facial recognition — but its current programs are just the beginning.

No, you don’t have to participate in facial recognition at the airport. Whether you’ll feel like you have a real choice is a separate question.

How TSA facial recognition works

American airports have been experimenting with so-called biometric technology for years, following the 9/11 attacks. You might have seen Customs collecting biometric information from passengers entering the United States. In 2019, I tested some of the ways airlines were using face scans to replace boarding passes for international flights. The TSA’s facial recognition pilot began at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) amid concerns about covid transmission through contact in August 2020.

This system is for general passenger security screening. You step up to the travel document checker kiosk and stick your ID into a machine. Then you look into a camera for up to five seconds and the machine compares your live photo to the one it sees on your ID. They call this a “one to one” verification system, comparing one face to one ID. Even though the software is judging if you’re an impostor, there’s still a human agent there to make the final call (at least for now).

So how accurate is it? The TSA says it’s been better at verifying IDs than the manual process. “This technology is definitely a security enhancement,” Lim said. “We are so far very satisfied with the performance of the machine’s ability to conduct facial recognition accurately.”

What about people who don’t exactly look like their driver’s license photo? Minor variations in appearance over time — such as changing your hairstyle — have negligible negative impact on identity verification, the TSA says.

But the TSA hasn’t actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches. Some of that might come to light next year when the TSA has to make its case to the Department of Homeland Security to convert airports all over the United States into facial recognition systems.

“I am worried that the TSA will give a green light to technology that is more likely to falsely accuse Black and Brown and nonbinary travelers and other groups that have historically faced more facial recognition errors,” said Cahn of STOP.

Research has shown facial recognition algorithms can be less accurate at identifying people of color. A study published by the federal National Institute of Science and Technology in 2019 found that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than White men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search.

Should travelers be concerned? “No one should worry about being misidentified. That is not happening, and we work diligently to ensure the technology is performing according to the highest scientific standards,” Lim told me. “Demographic equitability is a serious issue for us, and it represents a significant element in our testing.”

That doesn’t satisfy critics such as Cahn. “I don’t trust the TSA to evaluate the efficacy of its own facial recognition systems,” he said.

What about your privacy?

When some people hear about governments using facial recognition, they rightly picture the situation in China, where broad use of the technology makes it extremely difficult for citizens to evade surveillance. Does going through airport security now mean Homeland Security has a face ID that can identify you at a protest?

The TSA says it doesn’t use facial recognition for law-enforcement purposes. It also says it minimizes holding on to our face data, so it isn’t using the scans to build out a new national database of face IDs.

“The scanning and match is made and immediately overwritten at the Travel Document Checker podium. We keep neither the live photo nor the photo of the ID,” said Lim. But the TSA did acknowledge there are cases in which it holds on to the data for up to 24 months so its science and technology office can evaluate the system’s effectiveness.

What’s more, the TSA already has a plan to expand the scope of how it’s using the tech. It’s running a pilot of a second system at a few airports where you don’t even have to present your physical ID for inspection. Your face is your ID.

In tests with Delta, machines compare passengers’ live faces to a database of photos the government already has, typically from passports. For now, this system only works for passengers with PreCheck or Global Entry and passengers also have to request it from Delta. A colleague recently tried it in Atlanta and reported it was like an extra-fast version of PreCheck that probably saved him five minutes on his trip.

Just remember: Any time data gets collected somewhere, it could also be stolen — and you only get one face. The TSA says all its databases are encrypted to reduce hacking risk. But in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that photos of travelers were taken in a data breach, accessed through the network of one of its subcontractors.

Your rights

So do you have to participate?

“None of this facial recognition technology is mandated,” said Lim. “Those who do not feel comfortable will still have to present their ID — but they can tell the officer that they do not want their photo taken, and the officer will turn off the live camera.” There are also supposed to be signs around informing you of your rights.

But does it mean you’ll get moved to a slow line, get an extra pat down, or a mark on your record? “You should have no derogatory experience based on you exercising your right,” said Lim. If you suspect that has happened, the TSA says you should ask to speak to a manager.

“What we often see with these biometric programs is they are only optional in the introductory phases — and over time we see them becoming standardized and nationalized and eventually compulsory,” said Cahn. “There is no place more coercive to ask people for their consent than an airport.”

Even people who care a lot about privacy often find their limits when it comes to airline travel. People gravitate to options that help them get through the airport faster — and it’s not hard to imagine ending up with a bifurcated airport experience, said Cahn.

Those who have the privilege of not having to worry their face will be misread can zip right through — whereas people who don’t consent to it pay a tax with their time. At that point, how voluntary is it, really?


https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/02/tsa-security-face-recognition/

Employment is an ultimatum game, where playing along might get workers less than employers, but refusing to play gets everyone zero.

Inflation is up. The stock market is down. Unemployment is just 3.5 percent. Yet labor force participation remains stubbornly low, with only 62.3 percent of the civilian population working or actively looking for work—well below pre-pandemic levels. And even before the pandemic, that figure had been steadily declining for years.

There are plenty of uncharitable theories about why the American work force is shrinking as a percentage of the population, resulting in 10 million unfilled jobs and a lot of well-wrung hands. The most common is simply that Kids These Days don't want to work and it'll be Gen Z's fault when the U.S. is no longer a global economic superpower.

A substantial number of younger people are not, in fact, keen to get hitched with an employer. In 2022, "for every [25- to 54-year-old] guy who is out of work and looking for a job," American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt told the Fifth Column podcast, "there are four guys who are neither working nor looking for work."

But the Kids These Days hypothesis is complicated by the fact that while the labor force participation rate includes people 16 and older, the largest component of the most recent reduction appears to be older people who took retirement early and/or previous retirees who have not rejoined the work force at the rates they once did. This trend may well reverse itself if the stock market continues to decline and retirement accounts evaporate, but for now it looks like baby boomers turning on, tuning in, and dropping out—however belatedly—are at least as much of a labor force problem as wayward youths.

What these two groups have in common can be found in an old chestnut of game theory: the ultimatum game. Even if you don't know the 1982 paper that popularized the experiment, you've certainly encountered the phenomenon. Imagine two people, one of whom is given $10 and told to propose a way to split the money with another person—a stranger, let's say. The catch is that if the stranger doesn't agree to the deal, they both get nothing.

Economists and psychologists alike love this experiment because it captures an interesting facet of human behavior that appears irrational at first glance. Surely the second man should accept any deal offered by the first. So what if he's offered just a penny? Free money is free money! Who cares if the other guy gets to keep $9.99? Instead, across all cultures and contexts, people reject offers they perceive to be unfair: The details vary, but human beings turn down money with astonishing consistency if they think they're being done dirty.

This allegory* to economic unfairness may well be what unites the "quiet quitters" of Gen Z and the early boomer retirees: They increasingly perceive the terms of employment to be so off-kilter that they would rather not work at all, even if that decision screws them over in the end.

"The process of contracting a worker is often close to ultimatum bargaining," explained Elwyn Davies (then with the University of Oxford) and Stanford University's Marcel Fafchamps in a 2016 paper exploring the effects of competition on behavior within the ultimatum game. "The employer specifies a job description and proposes a wage and the worker accepts or rejects."

So if employment is an ultimatum game—where playing along might get workers less than employers, but refusing to play gets everyone zero—what is causing the perception that the terms of employment are no longer worth accepting, even when both parties would benefit?

Positive views of capitalism more generally have slipped since 2019, with 39 percent expressing negative views in an August Gallup poll. Another Gallup poll found an uptick of 3 percentage points in people who say they are "completely dissatisfied" with their jobs, while the number of people who were "completely satisfied" fell 8 points.

The perception that conventional jobs are essentially offering workers a pittance while greedily holding back the bulk of the wealth is common in places like the r/antiwork subreddit, which has 2.3 million members. In fact, there's at least one discussion of the ultimatum game itself on that subreddit, which pulls some figures on companies' revenue vs. worker compensation and concludes: "If working for Apple was the ultimatum game, the proposer just got $100. They're offering you 23 [cents], and they keep $99.77. Deal or no deal?" The relative sizes of these numbers might also explain why simply raising wages hasn't brought people into the workforce, especially when paired with increased awareness of and dissatisfaction with the gap between CEO pay and worker pay in large corporations.

Early retirement also makes some sense on this accounting. Older people may have expectations about what their compensation or responsibilities should be, with reference to either the generation who retired before them or to their younger colleagues. When they are not offered what they perceive to be their due, they would rather zero out their income than continue to work.

Paul J. Zak, a neuroeconomist who has done experimental work on the role of empathy and perspective-taking in the ultimatum game, cautions against an approach that is "too econo-centric." Large and unpredictable government subsidies to individuals and corporations erode the broader sense that hard work will be rewarded and is worth pursuing, even if the wages offered previously seemed fair. There is almost certainly more at play than wage and price levels alone.

The pandemic threw a wrench into this and every sociological and economic question and will continue to annoy academics looking for patterns for at least another century. Many jobs did get appreciably worse during the height of COVID, when death suddenly became a possible side effect of working in the grocery store, a factor that shouldn't be underestimated. But decreases in labor force participation predate the pandemic.

In many ways, work is better than it has ever been. It is less dangerous, requires fewer hours, is less physically taxing, and affords the purchase of better stuff than for most of human history. But the supply chain interruptions of recent years paired with rapid changes in the terms of employment during the pandemic may well have disrupted the sense that the deal workers were being offered was fair.

The temptation of the ultimatum game is to dismiss the results as irrational and therefore bad. It's easy to dismiss workers as lazy or employers as short-sightedly selfish. But the consistency with which individuals in nearly all situations perform in the ultimatum game actually highlights something good about people: They care about what is fair and they will devote significant effort to making deals where everyone wins. The authors of that 2016 paper found, for instance, that in an environment with multiple employers and multiple employees, the offers tended to start higher and employees tended to do better overall. Competition causes employers to think harder about what workers want and to offer it as seamlessly as possible.

Right now there's something broken in our economy that is preventing employers and employees from cooperating with each other. The result is that too few deals are being struck and everyone is suffering. The challenge ahead is how to rebuild a sense that the game is fair and everyone is playing in good faith.

https://reason.com/2022/12/01/the-labor-market-is-broken/

• FTX’s bankruptcy case demands an independent review, the Department of Justice said, because of allegations of fraud and dishonesty which could damage the entire crypto industry.
• Andrew Vara, the U.S. bankruptcy trustee for FTX’s case, said Sam Bankman-Fried and his team mismanaged the company or potentially engaged in fraudulent conduct.
• The DOJ is seeking an independent examiner to investigate what happened leading up to FTX’s spectacular implosion

The Department of Justice has requested that an independent examiner be appointed to review “substantial and serious allegations of fraud, dishonesty” and “incompetence” after the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire. It could be one way for the DOJ to gather evidence of alleged fraud.

In a filing in Delaware federal bankruptcy court, Andrew Vara, a U.S. bankruptcy trustee, told the court that the allegations of corporate misconduct and complete failure merited an immediate and speedy examination of the events leading up to FTX’s stunning collapse three weeks ago.

Vara said there’s a substantial basis to believe that Bankman-Fried and other managers mismanaged FTX or engaged in fraudulent conduct.

“It seems to me that the DOJ is trying to use the bankruptcy process as a way of getting evidence,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti told CNBC.

“Many times, the Department of Justice and bankruptcy estates in fraud cases work together in compiling potential restitution or other types of actions to make victims whole,” he said. The DOJ “will likely be part of the asset recovery and potentially having a Victims Fund with money going to those that lost money and what the Department of Justice potentially will view as a fraud.”

“It just shows a level of interest and attention that they’re paying to this that should be troubling to Mr. Bankman-Fried.”

Vara said an examination is preferable to an internal investigation because of the wider implications the company’s collapse may have on the crypto industry.

Another legal expert said that there could be other factors at play, too, including the extensive political donations that FTX executives were involved in with both major political parties.

There have been “campaign donations on both sides of the aisle from FTX and there have been political overtones and undertones in this case,” said Braden Perry, former senior trial attorney at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and a Kennyhertz Perry partner.

“I think that this is just out of prudence and out of caution to make sure that whatever is happening is done at an independent level,” Perry said.

It’s not unusual to appoint a bankruptcy examiner. There was one to oversee the crypto bankruptcy process of Celsius Network, for example.

Bankruptcies above a certain size require an examiner. In this case, the U.S. trustee said that an examiner is mandatory because FTX’s fixed, liquidated and unsecured debts to customers exceed the $5 million threshold.

FTX’s November collapse left creditors reeling over the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases, and has rocked the wider crypto world. BlockFi, a crypto lender, filed for bankruptcy protection in New Jersey last month.

Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/ftx-doj-watchdog-calls-for-review-over-crypto-fraud-allegations.html

Finnish PM Sanna Marin has said Europe is "not strong enough" to stand up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine on its own, and has had to rely on US support.

During a visit to Australia, the leader of the pending Nato member said Europe's defences must be strengthened.

"I must be brutally honest with you, Europe isn't strong enough right now," she said. "We would be in trouble without the United States."

The US is by far the largest provider of military assistance to Ukraine.

Since the start of the war in February, it has committed $18.6bn (€17.7bn; £15.2bn) in support, a research briefing last month by the UK's House of Commons said.

The second largest donor is the European Union, followed by the UK, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy says. But their contributions are dwarfed by those of the US.

And with European countries' military stocks depleting as they supply Ukraine, Ms Marin said more needed to be done to bolster European defences.

Speaking at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney on Friday, Ms Marin said: "The United States has given a lot of weapons, a lot of financial aid, a lot of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Europe isn't strong enough yet."

She added that Europe must make sure it is "building those capabilities when it comes to European defence, European defence industry, and making sure that we could cope in different kinds of situations".

While in office, US President Donald Trump regularly criticised European countries in Nato for not spending enough on defence.

In 2020, it was estimated the US spent just over 3.7% of its GDP on defence - while the average for Nato's European members (and Canada) was 1.77%.

During her talk, Prime Minister Marin went on to criticise some European countries' attempts at building closer ties with Russia in recent decades.

"For a long time, Europe was building a strategy for Russia... to buy energy from Russia and to closen those economic ties, and we thought that this would prevent the war," she said.

But she said that mindset was "proven entirely wrong".

European countries should have listened to states like Poland and the Baltics, she said, who had warned that Russia does not "care about their economic ties, they don't care about the sanctions, they don't care about any of that" when it comes to invading Ukraine.

Wide-reaching sanctions have been introduced by the EU and the US, among others, with the aim of limiting the resources Russia has to continue the war.

Many European Union and Nato member countries have also pledged to increase their defence spending following the start of the war.

In February, Germany announced an extra $113bn (£84bn) for its army, and a constitutional commitment to Nato's military spending target of 2% of GDP.

In June, the UK - under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson - said its defence spending would hit 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade.

All Nato members must commit to 2% to "to ensure the alliance's military readiness," Nato says. And there have been recent calls on Nato members to increase their defence spending to 3% of GDP.

Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, formally applied to join Nato in May. Accession protocols were signed in July, although they are yet to be ratified by all other members.



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/5jStrj6/us-aid-to-ukraine.jpg

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63838350

Recently I came across a job listing that required over 9 years working experience to be qualified, looking at the job description, I didn't see any reason why someone with 5 years working experience was not suitable for it

Italy is to use more cash and fewer credit cards, bucking a global AML trend towards electronic currency, after Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, dismissed card payments as “private money”.

Meloni, who was elected in September, is finalising her first budget, which is due to include a rule allowing shopkeepers and businesses to refuse cards and demand cash for payments up to €60. The rule would raise the current limit of €30 and includes permission to sell and buy goods worth up to €5,000 in cash, up from €1,000.

Meloni has an unusual justification for supporting banknotes over plastic. She told parliament: “The only legal currency in Italy and Europe is the paper notes issued by the European Central Bank. Electronic money is not legal currency.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cash-must-be-king-giorgia-meloni-tells-shoppers-02crzx7rg

How many homes must the United States’ expensive coastal cities build to become affordable for middle-class and working-poor families again? Over the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts that question. I expected a straightforward response: If you build X units, you reduce rents by Y percent—which means that Washington, D.C., needs to build Z units to become broadly affordable again.

I did not get such a simple answer. “That’s a difficult question with a lot of moving parts,” Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution told me. “Are we assuming that all of these homes drop out of the sky today?” asked David Garcia, the policy director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, gave me a long response involving land prices, rental affordability, household formation, and building trends.

Still, all agreed that whatever the number is, it’s enormous. “All the numbers we have that address this question are huge. They’re massive,” Garcia said. “And they’re all a massive undercount.”

That strikes me as a problem. No one can say just what it would take to make Brooklyn affordable for workers who don’t have a college degree, render San Francisco accessible to families with kids and elderly couples on fixed incomes, or allow extended-family members in Boston to buy apartments within a few blocks of one another. That means we have no policy vision of how to make our biggest, most productive places affordable for all, and no plan to get there.

This is not just unfair to Americans who want to move to these places. High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us. A United States with more abundant housing in its big cities would have a more productive, vibrant, and dynamic economy too.

The best evidence for how much housing we need to build lies in the prices that people pay today. Nationwide, the share of renters who are considered “burdened”—spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities—has climbed to 47 percent; one in four renters—about 11 million—spend more than half their income on shelter. Renters today spend about 10 more percentage points of their earnings more on housing than they did in the 1970s. Meanwhile, rising prices have also forced millions of younger Americans to delay homeownership, making it impossible for many to buy their way onto the property ladder, particularly in California and New York.

People make painful choices: To keep their housing costs in line with their income, millions of families do not live where they want to or in the kinds of homes they want to or with the people they want to. When the mortgage on a townhouse is too costly, families keep renting their run-down apartment. When a third bedroom costs too much, parents give up on having a third kid. This is a public-policy catastrophe too.

The problem is largely, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities in the interior of the country, especially in the South, have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast have not. “The reason California has the affordability problems we have now is because we did not build,” said Garcia, of the Terner Center. “In the 1960s, 1970s, even into the 1980s, we built between 200,000 and 300,000 homes per year. In our most recent economic boom, we were building 100,000 a year.” He added: “That is the start and the end of the story when it comes to California.”

And elsewhere. New York City issued fewer new housing permits in the 2010s than it did in the 2000s or in the 1960s; it has, year after year, created more jobs than homes. Nationally, “household growth and new construction have been essentially coincident for the last seven or eight years,” said Herbert, of Harvard. “Typically, housing construction exceeds household formation by about 20 percent, because we’re always removing housing that has outlived its useful life. We haven’t been doing that for a long time. Just by that very simple measure, we’re not building enough.”

The answer is to build more. A lot more. Rough estimates of what economists call the “housing gap”—how much the United States would have to build to bring it back in line with historical trends—aren’t difficult to come by:

• Looking at the number of American households and the number of vacant housing units, Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored purchaser of mortgage-backed securities, estimates a current supply shortage of 3.8 million units, driven by a 40-year collapse in the construction of homes smaller than 1,400 square feet.
• The group Up for Growth also arrived at an estimate of 3.8 million, using data on the total demand for housing and the overall supply of habitable, available units.
• The National Association of Realtors compared the issuance of housing permits with the number of jobs created in 174 different metro areas. It found that only 38 metro regions are permitting enough new homes to keep up with job growth; in more than a dozen areas, including New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Miami, and Chicago, just one new home is getting built for every 20-plus jobs created. The NAR estimates an “underbuilding gap” of as many as 7 million units.

These numbers draw on data such as vacancy rates, household-formation trends, and building trends. But none of the estimates capture what I’ve come to think of as the affordability gap: the difference between the housing we have and the housing we would need in order to ensure that working-class people could once again live in our big coastal cities for a reasonable cost. Freddie Mac does not purport that building 3.8 million units would make New York accessible to big middle-class families and end homelessess in San Francisco. The National Association of Realtors is not contemplating whether janitors can walk to work in Boston.

Would filling the housing gap as measured by Freddie Mac or the NAR make a dent in costs? Absolutely, housing experts said. Studies show that when builders construct units in a given place, it reduces rents and sale prices in nearby blocks, as well as in nearby neighborhoods; conversely, restricting construction drives prices up. But such calculations do not scale up readily: Knowing that a 10 percent increase in the housing stock in a given place depresses rents by 1 percent within 500 feet does not mean that San Francisco’s increasing its housing stock by 500 percent would force rents down by 50 percent.  

As a general point, “it’s really hard to imagine the most expensive cities becoming significantly cheaper,” Schuetz told me. For one thing, creating new units would cause an increase in household formation: Young workers could opt for studios rather than shared apartments; multigenerational households could break apart. For another thing, high-income, high-cost cities have so much pent-up demand that any one city would have trouble becoming much more affordable on its own. If San Francisco built thousands of units, new parents would stay in the city rather than decamp for the East Bay. Newcomers would move in from around the region and across the world.

The rate at which a city adds new units would matter too, Garcia pointed out. Conjuring 10,000 housing units into existence overnight in Boston, which currently has about 300,000 of them, would cause prices to plummet. Building them over a decade might slow the arc of rent prices without ever causing them to fall. The kind of housing getting built matters as well. If New York were to approve the construction of thousands of single-room-occupancy units—dorms, pretty much—that would depress prices for single people and childless families without immediately affecting prices for parents.

Experts also noted that building more market-rate units would help wealthy families before it would help middle-class and poor families. “Saturating the market with more supply would naturally take the pressure off of landlords who keep raising rents,” says Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, the president of LA Family Housing, a homelessness-prevention nonprofit in Los Angeles. “But we’ll never target our most vulnerable renters if we only build 500,000 market-rate units.”

In one recent survey, just 30 to 40 percent of American adults said they believed that increasing the housing stock would slash prices and rents; that belief—often described as “supply skepticism”—in turn dampened their enthusiasm for new construction. Such mistrust is rooted in a confluence of events that countless city dwellers have seen with their own eyes: The laundromat closes. The soulless five-over-one condo building goes up. Black families leave and white couples flood in. And all the while, rents surge, making real-estate development look like an engine of gentrification rather than an engine of affordability.

But that displacement happens only because building dense housing is illegal in many rich neighborhoods, and because cities build so little of it overall. “If you want to build enough to really help low-income people, you’re talking about doing a lot of building,” Rick Jacobus, an expert on inclusionary housing and the principal of Street Level Urban Impact Advisors, told me.

As it turns out, two economists had, in a way, answered my question. Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago wanted to know how much GDP and productivity the United States gives up by throttling the housing supply in its biggest cities. In a blockbuster 2019 paper, they found that if New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—just those three cities—had the permitting standards of Atlanta or Chicago over the previous several decades, the U.S. economy would have been roughly $2 trillion bigger in 2009. American households would have earned an average of $3,685 more a year.

To come up with that estimate, the two economists built a complicated model that assumed Americans could move wherever their wages allowed and the housing supply would adjust as it would in a place with typical permitting standards. In such a world, they estimated in some associated work, 53 percent of Americans would not live where they are currently living. San Francisco would have an employed population 510 percent bigger than it does today—implying an overall population of something like 4 million, rather than 815,000, with 2 million housing units instead of 400,000. The Bay Area as a whole would be five times its current size, the economists estimated. The average city would lose 80 percent of its population. And New York would be a startling eight times bigger. Some back-of-the-envelope math (mine, not theirs) suggests that the United States would have—deep breath here—perhaps 75 million more housing units in its productive cities than it currently has.

I asked Moretti about the sheer size of the effects found in his and Hsieh’s work. “It’s not so implausible to me,” he said. “The differences in earnings and labor productivity between the areas that we’re looking at and the rest of the country are so big that if you expand those local economies, you get these big aggregate benefits.” In the real world, we miss those big aggregate benefits. We have less productivity and lower incomes, sure, but also less togetherness, less creativity, fewer babies, fewer vacations, fewer families living together, fewer people living how they want.

Moretti, a longtime San Francisco resident, is horrified by the city’s land-use policies and home prices. “This is something that is not just intellectual for me but very, very real, very present,” he said. He described walking by an empty lot in his neighborhood and being bothered over and over again that it never became an apartment building or even a single-family home. “It is inexcusable, not building on an empty lot. There is no way that having an empty lot in a place like San Francisco makes any sense.”


https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-us-needs-more-housing-than-almost-anyone-can-imagine/ar-AA14mqJ3

There is a group of people that longevity researchers call “SuperAgers,” who are in their 80s and beyond, but have the cognitive function of those decades younger.

Conversely, it’s possible for your brain to be older than your chronological age, which is what we want to avoid.

As a neuroscience researcher and author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” I’ve found that it’s our behaviors, not just our genes, that have a powerful impact on our brain’s destiny.  

So what sets SuperAgers apart from people who have weak memory skills? According to a 2021 study that followed SuperAgers over the course of 18 months, one key differentiator was that they kept learning new things throughout their life.

SuperAgers learn something new every day

Think of the brain like a bank account. We make “deposits” — or new connections between our brain cells — by learning. Our memories are housed in these connections.

As we age, we naturally lose some of those connections. It’s like making a withdrawal every year. But the more deposits we make throughout our lives, the less our net worth is affected by these withdrawals.

One study found that adults with more years of education had more active frontal lobes when they took memory tests. Activity in the frontal lobe is associated with better memory.

But higher education isn’t the only way to maintain memory. In another study, even if individuals had lower levels of education, if they attended lectures, read, wrote and read often, they had memory scores on par with those with more education.

Which types of learning are best for brain health?

Keeping your brain healthy is not all about Sudoku, Wordle or crossword puzzles. Those can have cognitive benefits, but you are mostly exercising with the knowledge and skills you already have.

What does make significantly new connections in the brain is learning new skills and information. And the process should be challenging: SuperAgers embrace — and sometimes crave — that feeling of frustration when they learn something outside of their expertise.

‘Cross-train’ your brain

Approach learning the way you would with fitness training. You wouldn’t go to the gym and only work out your forearms. Eventually, you would look like Popeye.

The same goes for the brain. Learning a new language, for example, works out different parts of the brain than a new sport or instrument does.

You can cross-train your brain by mixing mental and physical learning activities. Get out your calendar and plan different types of activities using this plan:

• Day 1: Learn something mentally stimulating, such as listening to a podcast or taking an online course.
• Day 2:  Do something that requires learning through movement, such as a new sport, dance or yoga pose.
• Day 3:  Be social. Grab coffee with a friend or go to a dinner party. Yes, social interaction is a form of learning that has been associated with staving off dementia.

No matter what it is, learning new things keeps your brain young. So if you discovered something you didn’t know before from reading this article, you’re already helping your brain age at a slower pace.

Marc Milstein, PhD, is a brain health expert and author of “The Age-Proof Brain: New Strategies to Improve Memory, Protect Immunity, and Fight Off Dementia.” He earned both his PhD in Biological Chemistry and his Bachelor of Science in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from UCLA, and has conducted research on genetics, cancer biology and neuroscience. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.



https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/25/brain-expert-the-no-1-thing-that-sets-superagers-apart-from-people-with-weak-memory-skills.html

Somebody or something out there has been buying a lot of gold — 400 tons of it in the third quarter, more than $20 billion worth at today’s price.

That’s double the amount that changed hands in the second quarter, and more than quadruple that of the first quarter, all according to the World Gold Council.

Central banks bought a quarter of it, but the rest? Nobody knows. Maybe some country or countries. But who? And why?

When Ken Kuttner worked at the New York Federal Reserve Bank back in the ’90s, he sometimes went into the basement.

“Buried deep in the Manhattan granite was a gold vault, and there were, if I remember correctly, there was 800,000 bars of gold in our basement,” he said.

One time, he got to pick one up. It was superheavy.

“Behind the main set of bars were a whole set of cages, and each cage belonged to different countries. So if country X wanted to transfer gold to country Y, one of the guys down in the gold vault would open up the cage, take out some bars of gold, wheel it around in a dolly and take it over to the cage for country Y,” he said.

Now Kuttner is an economics professor at Williams College, but by the time he left the Fed in 2003, a quarter of those gold bars were gone. There wasn’t some heist, central banks had just sold a lot of it off.

“Gold, well it really doesn’t earn any interest, for one thing,” he said.

Banks preferred Treasury debt. They earn interest and they’re easier to sell. This move away from gold was the trend for many years.

“There are maybe two dozen or fewer central banks that are buying gold, and then there are other central banks that are not buying gold — maybe 160 of them,” said Jeffrey Christian, managing partner of CPM Group.

At this point, most countries’ gold reserves, he said, are just residue from an age decades ago when the world was on the gold standard.

“Most of these central banks still only have 15% or 10% of their reserves in gold,” Christian said.

But since 2008, he said, while most central banks have been selling gold or not bothering with it, a few have been buying it up and then some. There are reasons gold could be useful. Central banks can use it to control their currencies’ value or pay for imports during a crisis.

“Another reason is if you have trouble paying off foreign debts, having some reserves could come in handy,” said Joe Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.

But reason No. 1 right now, Gagnon said, is avoiding economic sanctions.

If a country holds U.S. Treasuries, the U.S. can seize them. See: Russia. Gold in a vault at home is safe. So whoever is buying all that gold — Gagnon thinks it’s Russia, others suspect China — may be doing it to evade the long arm of the U.S.


https://www.marketplace.org/2022/11/22/somebodys-been-on-a-gold-buying-bender-its-not-clear-who-or-why/

those enviro fears were circa 2010...

tesla co founder JB Straubel has been in the recycling business a few years now. so kinda old news now

Have you ever dreamed about a three-day weekend all over the year? For some workers in the United Kingdom, it is becoming reality. As The Guardian reported this Monday, a hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay. This movement represents a revolution within Britain’s labor market.

2,600 workers

The 100 companies employ 2,600 staff, which represent a small percentage of the UK’s working population. However, the 4 Day Week Campaign group hopes that it can become a trend soon.

According to The Guardian, supporters of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age. For them, a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity. Also, they believe that the policy has proven a useful way of attracting and retaining employees.

The two biggest companies that have signed up are Atom Bank and global marketing company Awin. With 450 employees each, those companies have been accredited by the four-day week campaign.

Wellness and wellbeing

In an interview with the Guardian, Adam Ross, Awin’s chief executive, said adopting the four-day week was “one of the most transformative initiatives we’ve seen in the history of the company.

“Over the course of the last year and a half, we have not only seen a tremendous increase in employee wellness and wellbeing but concurrently, our customer service and relations, as well as talent relations and retention also have benefited,” he told the British media outlet.

The Guardian also revealed that the UK campaign is also coordinating the world’s biggest pilot scheme for about 70 companies.

This project aims to employ about 3,300 workers, to adopt the four-day week in a trial with researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Boston College and thinktank Autonomy.

Increasing momentum

Joe Ryle, the UK campaign’s director, said there was increasing momentum in the adoption of the four-day week, even as companies brace for a long recession.

“We want to see a four-day week with no loss of pay become the normal way of working in this country by the end of the decade so we are aiming to sign up many more companies over the next few years,” he said.

Most of the companies that have officially adopted the four-day week are in the services However, the campaign said that some manufacturing and construction employers had also signed up.



https://news.yahoo.com/hundred-uk-companies-adopt-four-120000418.html