Let me ask you some serious questions:
- if others are making the decisions why are they allowing some muppet to earn twice as much as them while they do all the work and they also have the decisional power?
- if multi-billion companies are that stupid to ruin everything because of a stupid CEO who knows shit, how are those multi-billions companies still up and running, and more importantly how have they got so big in the first place and why others have failed
- if there is no skill needed to be picked as a CEO, do they pick those from the street, or as we can obviously see they have been in the company for years which makes you wonder if they are not actually the most familiar with how everything works?
- in a free market, in a private business, why do you care how much a guy makes when that's not your money or your business? Or should I rephrase that: not your shares, not your coins?

This socialist way of thinking when the mass decides who gets paid how much should really stop, why do you give a damn, if they hire stupid people good for you, you can start your own business and you will crush them since they are stupidly overpaid and overweight pikachus, but as always behind all the hate the reality is different.

This example you give could not be more biased. For starters, Bill Gates was not just a CEO, he is the one who founded the company. But I can assure you that an important part of the work of CEOs of non-tech companies today consists of answering emails, in addition to phone calls and videoconference meetings.

But the emails they respond to are not the kind that can be answered by the last employee to join the company, which you seem to put on a par. Or I don't know if you are one of those who believe that for someone to get paid a lot for their work they have to sweat and can't get paid a lot for being in front of an air-conditioned computer in the office.

Drought killed agriculture here also ... i have some land , zero income from there this year ... it's like it's all f..ked !

WASHINGTON (AP) — The flagship climate change and health care bill passed by Democrats and soon to be signed by President Joe Biden will bring U.S. taxpayers one step closer to a government-operated electronic free-file tax return system.

It’s something lawmakers and advocates have been seeking for years. For many Americans, it’s frustrating that beyond having to pay sometimes hefty tax bills, they also have to shell out additional money for tax preparation programs or preparers because of an increasingly complex U.S. tax system.

“It’s definitely something we should do, and when the IRS is adequately resourced, it’s something that will happen,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a June Senate Finance Committee hearing.

And now that the IRS is set to receive nearly $80 billion through the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” the agency has the means to develop new systems to help Americans pay their taxes. The legislation passed Congress on Friday.

Several hurdles stand in the way. Even in a best-case scenario, it will likely take years to get a new, free system up and running. There’s also pushback from commercial tax preparation companies, which question whether Americans want the IRS to prepare their taxes.

Perhaps this biggest hurdle is an agreement between the IRS and some commercial tax preparation companies, known as the Free File Alliance, which prevents the federal agency from creating its own free tax return filing system. In short, the IRS agreed not create its own filing system if companies would instead provide free services to taxpayers making $73,000 or less.

That 16-year provision within the agreement was formally nixed in 2019, but tax experts and government reports say the program’s existence is largely responsible for the IRS not pursuing its own electronic free file system.

The program has been marred with controversy, with commercial firms misrepresenting their services and low taxpayer participation rates.

The Government Accountability Office in April reported that while 70% of taxpayers were eligible for services through the Free File Alliance, only 3% of taxpayers actually use the service. The watchdog recommended the IRS find new free filing options before the Alliance expires in October 2023.

With the funding in the bill, the IRS has an opportunity to create a new system.

Included is a provision that allots $15 million to the IRS to make plans for a free direct e-file tax return system. Those plans would have to be developed within nine months and would include cost estimates for creating and administering a system. They would also require public input.

There are also legislative attempts to move this effort along.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in July resubmitted a bill called the Tax Filing Simplification Act that would require the IRS to create its own free online tax filing service and move away from its partnership with private online tax preparation companies.

“I’ve been pushing for a free tax filing system for years, and now the IRS is on the verge of having significant funding to modernize its IT systems, which means it’s time to develop simplified filing tools laid out in my Tax Filing Simplification Act,” Warren told The Associated Press.

“Americans spend too much time and money to file their taxes, and the IRS should adopt these proposals to help millions of Americans file taxes and claim refunds.”

At her Finance Committee appearance, Yellen called for a new system.

“There’s no reason in the world that a modern economy shouldn’t have a system that makes it easy for such a large group of taxpayers to file their returns,” she said.

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said “if the IRS moves forward with a free product, it could save lower-income families the money they used to give to H&R Block or TurboTax.”

“Tax prep companies are notorious for tricking tax filers into paying for services they should be getting for free,” Williamson said, “so an IRS free file service would be a very welcome step that would save Americans money.”

In 2019, ProPublica wrote about Intuit’s TurboTax and H&R Block Inc.’s efforts to mislead taxpayers away from the federally supported free services for which they qualified. And in May, New York Attorney General Letitia James secured a $141 million settlement with Mountain View, California-based Intuit Inc., which had to pay restitution to some taxpayers.

Intuit withdrew from the Alliance in July 2021, stating in a blog post that the company could provide its benefits without the Free File Alliance’s limitations. H&R Block withdrew from the partnership in 2020.

“Most Americans don’t want the tax collector to also serve as the tax preparer,” said Derrick L. Plummer, a spokesman for Intuit.

“The IRS already has a core mission that it needs to focus on, and creating a new system would cost billions of taxpayer dollars and jeopardize the financial freedom of millions more,” he said. A spokesperson for H&R Block did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

Ideas for what a government run free-file program might look like are already being studied.

Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economist, has examined systems in other countries in which taxpayers don’t have to enter much data on their electronic forms because the government has already done so.

“The IRS has tremendous amounts of information on wages and dividends,” he said, adding that a government-supported tax filing system “could be a wonderful thing.”

Such systems are used in Germany, Japan and other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that collaborate to develop policies that promote economic growth.

“As a taxpayer, there could be a great benefit to pre-population,” he said. “Filing taxes is enormously time-consuming. Given all the information the IRS has on taxpayers, they could simply send you a completed return.”

__

This story was first published on August 13, 2022. In it, The Associated Press reported that an agreement with the Free File Alliance and the IRS prevents the agency from creating its own electronic free-file tax return system. The story was updated on August 15, 2022, to make clear that while the 16-year provision within the agreement was formally nixed in 2019, tax experts and government reports say the Free File Alliance program’s existence is largely responsible for the IRS not pursuing its own electronic free file system.




https://apnews.com/article/irs-free-file-system-expansion-one-step-closer-democrats-b2c39db83e4a95f1d1cd1aa488495256

Many Big Tech companies have been laying off then employees and the latest company to join the list is Google. According to reports, Google executives have warned workers to either boost performance or prepare to leave. Insider report revealed that a company-wide message said that if the next quarterly earnings has not improved there will be "there will be blood on the streets".

The report also claimed that Google Cloud sales leadership has threatened employees with an "overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general" before the third quarter evaluation. The message has left Google employees "fearful of layoffs". The news comes after Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported weaker-than-expected earnings, and revenue growth was slowed down to 13 percent from 62 percent in the same quarter last year, April to June.

Another report in The New York Post revealed that recently Google also quietly extended its hiring freeze this month. The company had decided to stop hiring new candidates for few weeks to review the current employees and decide on the future course.

Last month, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai had also told employees that they must improve productivity due to fierce economic headwinds. He asked for ideas on how to get better results faster, he was quoted saying, "There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have."

According to Pichai, "it's clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead".

For the unversed, some of the other companies that have resorted to layoff include LinkedIn, Meta, Oracle, Twitter, Nvidia, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Intel and Salesforce, among others.

https://in.mashable.com/culture/36747/google-executives-warn-employees-about-layoffs-says-there-will-be-blood-on-streets

Some of the other companies that have resorted to layoff include LinkedIn, Meta, Oracle, Twitter, Nvidia, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Intel and Salesforce, among others.

I am pretty sure the reason why they apply a certain membrane between the layers of land fill waste is to contain that methane release.

They dump the garbage and after a few weeks they cover it up so it doesn’t produce methane. They add a thick layer and they pile more garbage on top of that and eventually also cover it up. The bigger issue with landfill is the toxic liquids that are released and harder to control.

The Houston Texans enter the crypto realm as the first NFT team in history to accept crypto. The acceptance of crypto is made possible through its recent partnership with the Houston-based crypto wallet platform called BitWallet.

Houston Texans easing the payments with crypto

The partnership will allow fans to use their cryptocurrency for payments to purchase single game suites. The Houston Texans also earn the title of being the first NFL team to sell a suite through crypto payments.

“We are proud to partner with BitWallet to offer an exciting option for our fans who are looking to enjoy Texans gameday in one of our suites.”

“Digital currency has become a primary means of payment and by partnering with BitWallet, the Texans are leading the way in the NFL.” “I am honored that BitWallet is the first to offer Texans fans this service,” said BitWallet CEO John T. Perrone.

The most recent trend in cryptocurrency initiatives is the sponsorship of sports, including baseball, Formula 1, UFC, football, and eSports. The multi-million dollar expenditures on sports partnerships are primarily intended to increase credibility and fan engagement.

Crypto transactions involving sports clubs and leagues increased by over 100% in 2021 and are anticipated to continue growing in the years to come.

For leagues, clubs, and sportsmen throughout the world, the crypto sector is incredibly valuable. In response, leagues, teams, and professional players are attempting to engage with younger audiences, such as Gen Zers and Millennials, a difficult-to-reach yet crucial demographic for the sports business.

With the soaring adoption of cryptocurrencies and the fact, that they are the fastest and most reliable mode of payment for many as compared to conventional modes of payment, the acceptance of crypto is crucial. Not just by merchants worldwide, but the sports teams and companies accepting crypto for payments are actually easing the whole process for the fans.

https://watcher.guru/news/houston-texans-earn-the-title-for-the-first-nfl-team-to-accept-crypto-for-single-game-suites

Landfills are releasing large amounts of planet-warming methane gas into the atmosphere from the decomposition of waste and are a significant contributor to such emissions in urban areas, a study suggests.

Scientists used satellite data from Delhi and Mumbai in India, Lahore in Pakistan and Buenos Aires in Argentina and identified specific locations in each city that persistently emit high methane levels, all of which were landfills. The cities' overall methane emissions from all sources were 1.4 to 2.6 times higher than previous estimates.

The study, published in Science Advances on Wednesday, is aimed at helping local governments carry out targeted efforts to limit global warming by pinpointing specific sites of major concern.

When organic waste like food, wood or paper decomposes, it emits methane into the air. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions globally, after oil and gas systems and agriculture.

Although methane only accounts for about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions and lasts about a dozen years in the air, it traps 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. Scientists estimate that at least 25% of today's warming is driven by methane from human actions.

"This is the first time that high-resolution satellite images have been used to observe landfills and calculate their methane emissions," said Joannes Maasakkers, lead author of the study and atmospheric scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

"We found that these landfills, which are relatively small compared to city sizes, are responsible for a large fraction of total emissions from a given area," he said.

Satellite data to detect emissions is still a relatively new field, but it's being used more and more to observe gases across the world. It means more independent organizations are tracking greenhouse gases and identifying big emitters, whereas previously local government figures were the only source available.

"This new work shows just how important it is to manage landfills better, especially in countries like India where landfills are often on fire, emitting a wide range of damaging pollutants," said Euan Nisbet, an Earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who wasn't part of the study.

Earlier this year, smoke hung over New Delhi for days after a massive landfill caught fire as the country was sweltering in an extreme heat wave with temperatures surpassing 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). At least two other landfill fires have been reported in India this year.

Nisbet added that the newer satellite technology, combined with on-the-ground measurements, makes it easier for researchers to identify "who is polluting the world."

China and India are the world's biggest methane polluters, a recent analysis by the International Energy Agency found.

At last year's United Nations climate conference, 104 countries signed a pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030 compared with 2020 levels. Both India and China are not signatories.

The authors plan to carry out more research into landfill sites across the world in future studies.

"It is a quickly developing field and we expect more interesting data to come out soon," said Maasakkers.



https://phys.org/news/2022-08-satellite-landfills-methane-super-emitters.html

If the quantum computing era dawned 3 years ago, its rising sun may have ducked behind a cloud. In 2019, Google researchers claimed they had passed a milestone known as quantum supremacy when their quantum computer Sycamore performed in 200 seconds an abstruse calculation they said would tie up a supercomputer for 10,000 years. Now, scientists in China have done the computation in a few hours with ordinary processors. A supercomputer, they say, could beat Sycamore outright.

“I think they’re right that if they had access to a big enough supercomputer, they could have simulated the … task in a matter of seconds,” says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. The advance takes a bit of the shine off Google’s claim, says Greg Kuperberg, a mathematician at the University of California, Davis. “Getting to 300 feet from the summit is less exciting than getting to the summit.”

Still, the promise of quantum computing remains undimmed, Kuperberg and others say. And Sergio Boixo, principal scientist for Google Quantum AI, said in an email the Google team knew its edge might not hold for very long. “In our 2019 paper, we said that classical algorithms would improve,” he said. But, “we don’t think this classical approach can keep up with quantum circuits in 2022 and beyond.”

The “problem” Sycamore solved was designed to be hard for a conventional computer but as easy as possible for a quantum computer, which manipulates qubits that can be set to 0, 1, or—thanks to quantum mechanics—any combination of 0 and 1 at the same time. Together, Sycamore’s 53 qubits, tiny resonating electrical circuits made of superconducting metal, can encode any number from 0 to 253 (roughly 9 quadrillion)—or even all of them at once.

Starting with all the qubits set to 0, Google researchers applied to single qubits and pairs a random but fixed set of logical operations, or gates, over 20 cycles, then read out the qubits. Crudely speaking, quantum waves representing all possible outputs sloshed among the qubits, and the gates created interference that reinforced some outputs and canceled others. So some should have appeared with greater probability than others. Over millions of trials, a spiky output pattern emerged.

The Google researchers argued that simulating those interference effects would overwhelm even Summit, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has 9216 central processing units and 27,648 faster graphic processing units (GPUs). Researchers with IBM, which developed Summit, quickly countered that if they exploited every bit of hard drive available to the computer, it could handle the computation in a few days. Now, Pan Zhang, a statistical physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues have shown how to beat Sycamore in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters.

Following others, Zhang and colleagues recast the problem as a 3D mathematical array called a tensor network. It consisted of 20 layers, one for each cycle of gates, with each layer comprising 53 dots, one for each qubit. Lines connected the dots to represent the gates, with each gate encoded in a tensor—a 2D or 4D grid of complex numbers. Running the simulation then reduced to, essentially, multiplying all the tensors. “The advantage of the tensor network method is we can use many GPUs to do the computations in parallel,” Zhang says.

Zhang and colleagues also relied on a key insight: Sycamore’s computation was far from exact, so theirs didn’t need to be either. Sycamore calculated the distribution of outputs with an estimated fidelity of 0.2%—just enough to distinguish the fingerprintlike spikiness from the noise in the circuitry. So Zhang’s team traded accuracy for speed by cutting some lines in its network and eliminating the corresponding gates. Losing just eight lines made the computation 256 times faster while maintaining a fidelity of 0.37%.

The researchers calculated the output pattern for 1 million of the 9 quadrillion possible number strings, relying on an innovation of their own to obtain a truly random, representative set. The computation took 15 hours on 512 GPUs and yielded the telltale spiky output. “It’s fair to say that the Google experiment has been simulated on a conventional computer,” says Dominik Hangleiter, a quantum computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. On a supercomputer, the computation would take a few dozen seconds, Zhang says—10 billion times faster than the Google team estimated.

The advance underscores the pitfalls of racing a quantum computer against a conventional one, researchers say. “There’s an urgent need for better quantum supremacy experiments,” Aaronson says. Zhang suggests a more practical approach: “We should find some real-world applications to demonstrate the quantum advantage.”

Still, the Google demonstration was not just hype, researchers say. Sycamore required far fewer operations and less power than a supercomputer, Zhang notes. And if Sycamore had slightly higher fidelity, he says, his team’s simulation couldn’t have kept up. As Hangleiter puts it, “The Google experiment did what it was meant to do, start this race.”



https://www.science.org/content/article/ordinary-computers-can-beat-google-s-quantum-computer-after-all

Many warning signs suggesting that a debt reckoning is imminent

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Confidence in the safety of Chinese banks has been badly shaken by the failure of several small banks in Henan Province in April this year. In terms of their assets of about 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) and the number of customers, roughly 400,000, the shuttered rural banks are minions in China's financial system.

The implosion of these poorly supervised and likely corruption-ridden financial institutions should not be surprising. But how local authorities handled the fallout is shocking even to the most jaded observers of China's political scene.

Instead of compensating the depositors, who are entitled to up to 500,000 yuan, according to government regulations, officials in Henan have done everything imaginable to silence them.

They initially restricted the movement of the depositors by turning the COVID test code on their smartphones red, which effectively made it impossible for them to take public transportation or even drive their own cars. A public outcry forced the Henan government to abandon this abusive tactic.

But when several hundred depositors unable to gain access to their savings in the failed banks gathered on July 10 to protest in front of the People's Bank branch office in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, local officials sent in a large number of thugs who viciously assaulted the depositors, with uniformed police officers looking on.

This scandal should alarm investors not simply because of the brutal tactics used by local authorities eager to cover it up but because of the circumstances under which these small banks failed.

Ever since China began to binge on debt to fuel its growth in 2009, many have wondered how long the party could go on. To the chagrin of many bearish observers, predictions of a financial crisis have not panned out. Today, China's banking system is still standing despite a debt-to-GDP ratio of 264%.

Perhaps because Beijing seems to be able to defy financial gravity, fewer people these days worry that its ballooning debt could unleash a systemic crisis. But there are many warning signs indicating that China may face a debt reckoning soon.

Weak supervision, poor risk management and corruption that likely drove the small rural banks in Henan into insolvency are systemic among the country's nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized banks with nearly $14 trillion assets.

It is highly likely that other similar banks will fail soon. By pure coincidence, when Henan authorities were cracking down on the victims of bank failure there, authorities in Shanghai had put on trial, in secret, a former billionaire who allegedly controlled a medium-sized bank in Inner Mongolia and used it to fund various illicit schemes. When the government seized the failed bank in 2019, the bailout cost several billion dollars.

If a large number of small banks fail together, such an event could produce a chain reaction threatening the stability of the financial sector. Their counterparties and lenders, especially bigger banks, could suffer massive losses. Confidence in China's shadow banking system, through which small banks attract funds with a higher interest rate, will likely evaporate.

The chances of such a financial meltdown are much higher today than before. One of the reasons that China has avoided a financial crisis in the last decade is that its economy managed to grow at a reasonably high rate, averaging 6.8% a year from 2011 to 2020. A faster-growing economy normally makes it easier to manage or even conceal the debt burden.

But as the Chinese economy is now slowing down rapidly, in part due to Beijing's zero-COVID policy, the debt bomb is ticking much louder.

The most ominous warning light is clearly China's debt-ridden real estate sector. China Evergrande Group, the country's largest real estate developer, which has borrowed more than $300 billion, has already defaulted on its bonds. More defaults seem likely because Chinese developers are on the hook for $13 billion in dollar-denominated bond payments in the second half of this year.

China's debt-laden local governments are also facing grim prospects. Declining income from land sales because of the crisis in the real estate sector and falling tax receipts are expected to cause a 6 trillion yuan shortfall, roughly $900 billion, in local government revenues this year. Local government financing vehicles that have borrowed heavily from banks or issued bonds will have great difficulties servicing their debt.

Large banks in China are in trouble as well. They have lent tens of billions to poor countries as part of China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. A significant portion of their credit portfolio is likely to become nonperforming as their borrowers are unable to service the debt due to the global economic downturn.

The most recent economic implosion and the collapse of the government of Sri Lanka will likely force their Chinese lenders to write off a large portion of the loans. If big Chinese banks themselves face rising nonperforming loans abroad, they will be less able to help bail out insolvent small or medium-sized banks at home.

It might be possible for China to dodge another financial meltdown this time. But if local officials have to hire thugs to attack bank customers trying to get their money back, investors should brace for far worse days ahead for China's banking sector.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/China-s-debt-bomb-looks-ready-to-explode