But I really can't tell how thus Investing in The Economy will help one's Country.

They say dollar going weaker and weaker usa economy dont look good....but here is the thing...the wall street is in usa not in russia not in china

the tax placed on gasoline is 18 cents per gallon and 24 cents for diesel,

How High are Gas Taxes in Your State?

July 28, 2021



https://i.imgur.com/xurkh4R.jpg

California pumps out the highest state gas tax rate of 66.98 cents per gallon, followed by Illinois (59.56 cpg), Pennsylvania (58.7 cpg), and New Jersey (50.7 cpg). The lowest state gas tax rates can be found in Alaska at 14.98 cents per gallon, followed by Missouri (17.42 cpg) and Mississippi (18.79 cpg).

https://taxfoundation.org/state-gas-tax-rates-2021/

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said it will take two years for inflation to fall

Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days

April 7, 2021

The fast rise and even faster fall of a trader who bet big with borrowed money.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-08/how-bill-hwang-of-archegos-capital-lost-20-billion-in-two-days

MICHAEL JORDAN IS 'WORST NBA OWNER EVER,' BAYLESS SAYS

Then, there were the draft decisions.

"Michael Jordan is the man who took Adam Morrison over Brandon Roy. He took Kemba (Walker) over Klay (Thompson) and Kawhi (Leonard). Michael took Michael Kidd-Gilchrist over Bradley Beal, Cody Zeller over Giannis (Anteokounmpo), Noah Vonleh over Zach LaVine, Frank Kaminsky over Devin Booker. He even took Malik Monk over Donovan Mitchell.

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nba/michael-jordan-is-worst-nba-owner-ever-bayless-says

Traffic from occupied Ukraine subjected to Russia's censorship, surveillance machine.

Web pages in the city of Kherson in south Ukraine stopped loading on people’s devices at 2:43 pm on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone connecting to the Internet with KhersonTelecom, known locally as SkyNet, couldn’t call loved ones, find out the latest news, or upload images to Instagram. They were stuck in a communications blackout. When web pages started stuttering back to life at 3:42 pm, everything appeared to be normal. But behind the scenes everything had changed: Now all Internet traffic was passing through a Russian provider and Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.

Since the end of May, the 280,000 people living in the occupied port city and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as Internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections through Russian infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast surveillance and censorship network, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis viewed by WIRED.

The Internet companies have been told to reroute connections under the watchful eye of Russian occupying forces or shut down their connections entirely, officials say. In addition, new unbranded mobile phone SIM cards using Russian numbers are being circulated in the region, further pushing people toward Russian networks. Grabbing control of the servers, cables, and cell phone towers—all classed as critical infrastructure—which allow people to freely access the web is considered one of the first steps in the “Russification” of occupied areas.

“We understand this is a gross violation of human rights,” Victor Zhora, the deputy head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, known as the State Services for Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP), tells WIRED. “Since all traffic will be controlled by Russian special services, it will be monitored, and Russian invaders will restrict the access to information resources that share true information.”

KhersonTelecom first switched its Internet traffic to a Russian network on April 30, before flipping back to Ukrainian connections for the majority of May. However, things appear to have shifted permanently since May 30. All of KhersonTelecom’s traffic is now being routed through Miranda Media, a Crimea-based company that is itself connected to Russian national telecom provider Rostelecom. (Miranda Media was set up after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.) The day after KhersonTelecom made its latest switch, state-controlled Russian media outlet RIA Novosti claimed the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia areas were officially being moved to Russian Internet connections—days earlier, the outlet said the regions were also going to start using the Russian telephone code +7.

Zhora says that across occupied regions of Ukraine—including Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia—there is a patchwork of around 1,200 different ISPs. “We understand that most of them are forced to connect to Russian telecom infrastructure and reroute traffic,” Zhora tells WIRED. “Unfortunately, there are cases of massive routing of traffic of Ukrainian operators across Russian channels,” says Liliia Malon, the commissioner of Ukraine’s telecom regulator, the National Commission for the State Regulation of Electronic Communications. “Ukrainian networks are partially blocked or completely disconnected.”

Technical analysis confirms that the connections are switching. Internet monitoring company Cloudflare has observed KhersonTelecom’s traffic passing through Miranda Media for more than two weeks in June. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik, has observed around half a dozen networks in Kherson connecting to the provider. “It's not a one-time thing,” Madory says. “Every couple of days, there's another company getting switched over to Russian transit from Ukraine.”

Since the start of Putin’s war in February, disrupting or disabling Internet infrastructure has been a common tactic—controlling the flow of information is a powerful weapon. Russian missiles have destroyed TV towers, a cyberattack against a satellite system had knock-on impacts across Europe, and disinformation has tried to break Ukrainian spirits. Despite frequent Internet blackouts, Ukraine’s rich ecosystem of Internet companies has rallied to keep people online. While Ukrainian troops are successfully launching counterattacksagainst Russian occupation in the south of the country, Kherson remains controlled by invading forces. (In March, it became the first major city to fall into Russian hands, and its residents have lived under occupation for around 100 days, reporting numerous incidents of torture.)

“It's one thing to take over a city and to control the supply lines into the city, the flow of food or fuel,” says David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare, who has written about Internet control in Kherson. But, he says, “controlling Internet access and being able to manipulate the Internet access into an occupied area” is a “new front” in the conflict.

There are multiple ways Russian forces are taking over Internet systems. First, there is physical access—troops are seizing equipment. Spokespeople for two of Ukraine’s biggest Internet providers, Kyivstar and Lifecell, say their equipment in Kherson was switched off by Russian occupying forces, and they don’t have any access to restore or repair equipment. (Throughout the war, Internet engineers have been working amid shelling and attacks to repair damaged equipment.) The SSSCIP says 20 percent of telecommunications infrastructure across the whole of Ukraine has been damaged or destroyed, and tens of thousands of kilometers of fiber networks are not functioning.

Once Russian forces have control of the equipment, they tell Ukrainian staff to reconfigure the networks to Miranda Media, Zhora says. “In case the local employees of these ISPs are not willing to help them with the reconfiguration, they are able to do it by themselves,” Zhora says. The SSSCIP, he adds, has advised staff not to risk their own lives or the lives of their families. “We hope that we are able to liberate these lands soon and this temporary period of blackmailing of these operators will pass off,” Zhora says, adding it is unlikely that communications in the region can be restored before the areas are liberated.

For the time being, at the very least, this means connections will be routed through Russia. When Gudz Dmitry Alexandrovich, the owner of KhersonTelecom, switched his connection to Miranda Media for the first time at the start of May, he claims some customers thanked him because he was getting people online, while others chastised him for connecting to the Russian service. “On May 30 again, like on April 30, everything absolutely everything fell and only Miranda's channels work,” Alexandrovich says in a translated online chat. In a long Facebook post published on the company’s page at the start of May, he claimed he wanted to help people and shared photos of crowds gathering outside KhersonTelecom’s office to connect to the Wi-Fi.

Russia is also trying to control mobile connections. In recent weeks, a mysterious new mobile company has popped up in Kherson. Images show blank SIM cards—totally white with no branding—being sold. Little is known about the SIM cards; however, the mobile network appears to use the Russian +7 prefix at the start of a number. Videos reportedly show crowds of citizens gathering to collect the SIM cards. “The Russian forces realize they're at a disadvantage if they keep using Ukrainian mobile networks,” says Cathal Mc Daid, the chief technology officer at mobile security company Enea AdaptiveMobile Security. The company has seen two separatist mobile operators in Donetsk and Luhansk expanding the territory they are covering to newly occupied areas.

Who controls the Internet matters. While most countries place only limited restrictions on the websites people can view, a handful of authoritarian nations—including China, North Korea, and Russia, severely limit what people can access.

Russia has a vast system of Internet censorship and surveillance, which has been growing in recent years as the country tries to implement a sovereign Internet project that cuts it off from the rest of the world. The country’s System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, can be used to read people’s emails, intercept text messages, and surveil other communications.

“Russian networks are fully controlled by the Russian authorities,” Malon, the Ukrainian telecom regulator, says. The rerouting of the Internet in occupied Ukrainian areas, Malon says, has the goal of spreading “Kremlin propaganda” and making people believe Ukrainian forces have abandoned them. “They are afraid that the news about the progress of the Ukrainian army will encourage resistance in the Kherson region and facilitate real activities,” Zhora says.

At the heart of the rerouting is Miranda Media, the operator in Crimea that appeared following the region’s annexation in 2014. Among “partners” listed on its website are the Russian security service known as the FSB and the Russian Ministry of Defense. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

In many ways, Crimea may act as an example of what happens next in newly occupied areas. “Only in 2017, Crimea was completely disconnected from Ukrainian traffic. And now, as far as I know, it's only Russian traffic there,” says Ksenia Ermoshina, an assistant research professor at the Center for Internet and Society and an affiliated researcher at the Citizen Lab. In January last year, Ermoshina and colleagues published research on how Russia has taken control of Crimea’s Internet infrastructure.

After it annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian authorities created two new Internet cables running along the Kerch Strait, where they connect with Russia. This process took three years to complete—something Ermoshina calls a “soft substitution model,” with connections transferring slowly over time. Since then, Russia has developed more advanced Internet control systems. “The power of the Russian censorship machine changed in between [2014 and 2022],” Ermoshina says. “What I'm afraid of is the strength of Russian propaganda.”

It’s likely that rerouting the Internet in Kherson and the surrounding areas is seen by Russian authorities as a key step in trying to legitimize the occupation, says Olena Lennon, a Ukrainian political science and national security adjunct professor at the University of New Haven. The moves could also be a blueprint for future conflicts.

Alongside Internet rerouting in Kherson and other regions, Russian officials have started handing out Russian passports. Officials claim a Russian bank will soon open in Kherson. And the region has been moved to Moscow’s time zone by occupying forces. Many of the steps echo what previously happened in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. “Russia is making it clear that they're there for a long haul,” Lennon says, and controlling the Internet is core to that. “They're making plans for a long-term occupation.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/russia-is-taking-over-ukraines-internet/?comments=1

As more banks go numberless to help stop fraud, we look at what it means for security and ease of use

First there was the contactless revolution; now credit and debit cards are going numberless.

Increasingly, banks are relegating information such as the 16-digit long number and the expiry date to the back of the card, while a few are going the whole hog and not printing them anywhere.

For decades, bank cards broadly looked the same: fairly utilitarian, with the account holder’s name, the long number and the “valid from” and “expires end” dates all usually on the front (plus, in the case of debit cards, the account number and sort code), and the three-digit card security code typically on the back.

However, it is now increasingly common to see a fairly simple and uncluttered front, or maybe an eye-catching image (such as a bright yellow beach hut), with the numbers and other personal information printed on the back.

In early 2020, a payment service called Curve announced it had launched “the first numberless cards in Europe”. These cards, made available to the company’s investors, had all the numbers removed.

Since then, in the UK, the digital bank Chase has made a feature of the fully numberless debit card that you get with its current account. It says this adds an extra layer of security for customers. But while the move has been welcomed by some customers, others have questioned how easy it is to pay for items online or by phone.

Among the high street banks, there is certainly a trend. Barclaycard redesigned its credit cards earlier this year to remove numbers from the front, while NatWest started to roll out new-look debit cards – where “all the usual card info is now on the back” – in April.

Halifax, HSBC and First Direct are just a few of the others that have done the same.

Some will wonder whether moving the numbers to the back and the other design changes are all about aesthetics, as banks attempt to woo the “Instagram generation” by freshening up their products.

But there are other factors at play, some of which reflect the rapid rise of digital wallet services such as Apple Pay. First Direct says its redesign means your card will be easier to find if you are scrolling through a digital wallet.

Meanwhile, HSBC says it wanted the front card design “to be simple, clean and effective to benefit our customers with disabilities. By moving all the text to the back of the card, we were able to go bigger and bolder with the text without interrupting the front design of the card.” It adds that moving the numbers to the back “does come with a level of improved security” as it means your card details are less visible to people nearby.

Chase, which launched in the UK last September, says a customer’s card details are stored behind a secure login on its app, so people are not putting their personal details at risk if they lose their physical card. It adds that should a customer ever need to replace their card details, they can instantly generate new ones in the app.

However, one customer tweeted that their numberless card was “annoying”, adding: “Each time I pay, I have to open the account and find the number instead of simply looking at a card and typing the number. Pretty pointless bit of security.”

The bank says your card details can be quickly accessed within the app by tapping the blue card at the top of the home screen, then tapping “see details”.

If you are returning or collecting something and are asked for a card number, it says you need to find the transaction in the app and scroll to “card ending with”. Most places should only need to see the last four digits, it adds.

A spokesperson says: “We hear consistently from customers that they view having a numberless card as an advantage in protecting against fraud and theft.”

One customer tweeted that moving to Chase was “the best thing I’ve ever done”, and that numberless cards meant that if there were any problems, “they just change the card number remotely, and no need to send one out unless you lose it. If you do lose it, there are no details on it for a scammer to use.”

Armen Najarian at Outseer, which specialises in anti-fraud solutions, says that even for providers such as Chase which have no numbers on their cards, “a card number does exist digitally, so vulnerabilities still exist”. He adds: “In the overwhelming majority of fraud cases, the fraudster never sees the card as these attacks tend to happen online ... So, if a card number exists – physically or digitally – it’s up for grabs.”

Santander has launched numberless cards in locations such as Mexico but says it does not currently have any plans to introduce them in the UK.

Guardian Money spoke to one UK bank that said it had considered going down the numberless route but decided against it. “Removing all card details forces customers to obtain these digitally,” the bank said, adding that many people are not digitally active.

However, David Griffiths at the payment technology firm Contis says: “Not printing the card numbers on the back of the card is presently a bit of a novelty. But if people come to believe it makes their details more secure, demand for such cards will grow. Primarily, I think numberless cards look neat, and we are going to see more of them because they look neat.”


https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jun/11/bank-cards-numbers-numberless-fraud

While many economists agree a recession is likely coming in 2023, Wall Street veteran and Bitcoin bull Mike Novogratz has just given one of the most dire outlooks yet.

“The economy is going to collapse,” Novogratz told MarketWatch on Wednesday, adding, “We are going to go into a really fast recession, and you can see that in lots of ways.”

Novogratz, chief executive of crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital, gave the interview just before the Federal Reserve raised rates by 0.75 percentage points—the largest rate hike seen since 1994. The rate hike came five days after U.S. consumer price increase unexpectedly surged in May to a 40-year high of 8.6%.

Novogratz pointed to the housing market, which is finally cooling down after a two-year hot streak, and inventories piling up as signs of a recession looming on the horizon.

“There are layoffs in multiple industries, and the Fed is stuck,” he said, adding that the central bank is in a position where it has to “hike [interest rates] until inflation rolls over.”

Novogratz accurately predicted in the interview that the central bank would lift rates by 75 points and that the market would rally on the news. After Fed chair Jerome Powell announced the rate hike, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 1%, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.5% and the Nasdaq rose 2.5%.

Novogratz also predicted there would be a stock selloff in the next coming days, which happened right on cue. At 8 a.m. ET, S&P 500 futures were trading 2.2% lower, wiping out yesterday's gains and plunging the benchmark further into a bear market.

“They are hiking into the popping of a bubble,” Novogratz said.

Recession looms

The U.S will officially be in a recession when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds a significant decline in economic activity that lasts over an extended period of time—usually two fiscal quarters.

According to a new survey of 49 U.S. macroeconomics experts conducted at the start of June by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago’s policy research center Initiative on Global Markets, this is likely to happen in 2023.

Nearly 70% of the economists surveyed believe the NBER will make the call at some point in 2023, with 38% predicting a recession will start in the first two quarters of 2023, and another 30% forecasting an official start in the second half.

The Fed appears largely powerless to stop runaway inflation, which is being driven up further by the soaring prices of food and fuel brought on by Russia's war on Ukraine.

In his announcement of Wednesday's rate hike, Powell signaled another large rate hike coming at the July FOMC meeting—in the 50- or even 75-basis-point range—with the Fed expecting weaker economic growth and higher unemployment.

Crypto crash

Novogratz didn’t give an indication of timing of when a recession will happen, but drew parallels to the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management fund and the current bloodbath that is happening in the crypto market.

Long Term Capital Management was a highly leveraged fund that lost $4.6 billion in less than four months from its exposure to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. The fall of the investing giant sent shock waves through global markets and led to a $3.6 billion bailout.

https://twitter.com/novogratz/status/1537036311613382656

On Wednesday, Bitcoin came very close to falling below $20,000. The crypto king has fallen more than 30% this month, and its decline on Wednesday marked the ninth straight day of losses. While it also rallied on the back of Powell’s announcement to $22,900, it has since fallen back to $21,015.




https://www.yahoo.com/video/wall-street-vet-bitcoin-bull-122037650.html